An Evaluation and Comparison for Phishing Attack Detection using Machine Learning Approaches

The persistent and evolving threat of phishing attacks demands effective and adaptive detection techniques. This research paper presents a comprehensive evaluation and comparison of various machine learning approaches to detect phishing attacks. We investigated five prominent algorithms: Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), Naive Bayes, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), to determine their efficacy in identifying phishing activities. Our methodology involved a systematic analysis using a large dataset of phishing and legitimate URLs, where each model was trained, tested, and validated to ensure robustness and reliability. The performance of each algorithm was assessed based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Among the evaluated models, XGBoost demonstrated superior performance, achieving an exceptional accuracy of 99.75%. This result underscores the potential of XGBoost in phishing attack detection, offering a promising tool for cybersecurity applications.