PhishShield: A Desktop Application to Detect Phishing Webpages through Heuristic Approach

Phishing is a website forgery with an intention to track and steal the sensitive information of online users. The attacker fools the user with social engineering techniques such as SMS, voice, email, website and malware. In this paper, we implemented a desktop application called PhishShield, which concentrates on URL and Website Content of phishing page. PhishShield takes URL as input and outputs the status of URL as phishing or legitimate website. The heuristics used to detect phishing are footer links with null value, zero links in body of html, copyright content, title content and website identity. PhishShield is able to detect zero hour phishing attacks which blacklists unable to detect and it is faster than visual based assessment techniques that are used in detecting phishing. The accuracy rate obtained for PhishShield is 96.57% and covers a wide range of phishing web sites resulting less false negative and false positive rate.