Survey and comparative analysis of phishing detection techniques: current trends, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

In the age of digital communication, scams such as phishing continue to be a problem, necessitating the need for ever-more-advanced detection techniques to safeguard sensitive data. Examining several methods now in use, this review article groups them according to the application (email, web server, mail server, or browser-based). It explores the advantages and disadvantages of behavior-based, heuristic-based, machine learning (ML)-based, and signature-based techniques and offers a comparative evaluation of their efficacy. The essay delves deeper into the latest developments in phishing detection research, such as ML-powered social media exploration and real-time website analysis. The evaluation goes beyond just identifying detecting techniques; it also includes a data-driven analysis. In particular, random forest and support vector machines are ML algorithms that regularly produce results with high accuracy for detecting phishing attempts. Metrics like as recall, F1-score, and precision show how well these algorithms. Furthermore, specialised techniques such as heuristic-based and cantina-based approaches provide remarkable performance, underscoring the possibility of additional research in this field. Future research explores improved phishing detection through: better accuracy with ML, integrating new technologies, analyzing user behavior. A hybrid approach combining these techniques offers a stronger defense.