Victim or Attacker? A Multi-dataset Domain Classification of Phishing Attacks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In “phishing attacks”, phishing websites disguised as trustworthy websites attempt to steal sensitive information from end users. Remediation options differ depending on whether the phishing website is hosted on a legitimate but compromised domain, in which case the domain owner is also a victim, or whether the domain itself is maliciously registered by an attacker. We propose here a novel machine-learning domain classifier, introducing features based on the internet presence and history of a domain, using only publicly available information. Using a phish feed and malicious domain feed from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), evaluation of our domain classifier achieves 94% accuracy on future malicious domains, while maintaining 88% and 92% accuracy on malicious and compromised datasets respectively from two other sources. To increase our training set we introduce a semi-supervised technique to label part of APWG's phish feed. For the rest of the feed we use our classifier and show that 62% of the websites hosting attacks are compromised while the remaining 38% belong to the attackers. The result of this research is a tool which gives some important insights on phisher's current modus operandi. It also provides a quick mechanism, entirely based on freely available data, to assess crucial information about the server and better respond to an attack by having it taken down as quickly as possible.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".