Email Phishing Attack Detection using Recurrent and Feed-forward Neural Networks

Royce Lobo, Muhammad Naveed Abbas, Mamoona Naveed Asghar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Email communication is significant in terms of its lateral and vertical information-sharing capability. The vulnerability of emails to phishing attacks poses significant threats to individuals and organizations, leading to financial losses, data breaches, and compromised security. This research study critically analyses features of email phishing through deep learning models. It examines the characteristics and patterns of phishing emails, such as misleading URLs, suspicious attachments, and linguistic cues that aim to manipulate the recipients. Then, the paper investigates the application of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for analysing and detecting email phishing attacks. For experimentation, three ANNs, i.e. two recurrent, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) & Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and one feed-forward, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are implemented and evaluated. The models are trained on the widely known Enron dataset of email samples, encompassing both spam and ham emails. The results show these ANNs outperform the traditional machine learning approaches as applied by contemporary research. While analyzing intra-model comparison using metrics, Recall & Type II Error, it is seen that CNN performs better than LSTM & RNN with 99% & 0.20% as compared to 31.32% & 38.60%, and, 52% & 27% respectively. Hence, the comparative analysis shows that the feed-forward (CNN) model performs better than recurrent (LSTM and RNN) models for detecting email phishing attacks. This finding can provide guidance to the research in this particular domain of email phishing.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2023 Cyber Research Conference - Ireland, Cyber-RCI 2023
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9798350309522
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event2023 Cyber Research Conference - Ireland, Cyber-RCI 2023 - Letterkenny, Ireland
Duration: 24 Nov 2023 → …

Publication series

Name2023 Cyber Research Conference - Ireland, Cyber-RCI 2023

Conference

Conference2023 Cyber Research Conference - Ireland, Cyber-RCI 2023
Country/TerritoryIreland
CityLetterkenny
Period24/11/23 → …

Keywords

  • artificial neural networks
  • convolutional neural network
  • email phishing
  • long short-term memory
  • recurrent neural network

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