Phishing Website Detection via a Transfer Learning based XGBoost Meta-learner with SMOTE-Tomek

The widespread proliferation of smartphones has advanced portability, data access ease, mobility, and other merits; it has also birthed adversarial targeting of network resources that seek to compromise unsuspecting user devices. Increased susceptibility was traced to user's personality, which renders them repeatedly vulnerable to exploits. Our study posits a stacked learning model to classify malicious lures used by adversaries on phishing websites. Our hybrid fuses 3-base learners (i.e. Genetic Algorithm, Random Forest, Modular Net) with its output sent as input to the XGBoost. The imbalanced dataset was resolved via SMOTE-Tomek with predictors selected using a relief rank feature selection. Our hybrid yields F1 0.995, Accuracy 1.000, Recall 0.998, Precision 1.000, MCC 1.000, and Specificity 1.000 – to accurately classify all 3,316 cases of its held-out test dataset. Results affirm that it outperformed benchmark ensembles. The study shows that our proposed model, as explored on the UCI Phishing Website dataset, effectively classified phishing (cues and lures) contents on websites.