A comparative analysis and awareness survey of phishing detection tools

Phishing is a kind of attack in which phishers use spoofed emails and malicious websites to steal personal information of people. Nowadays various tools are freely available to detect phishing and other web-based scams, many of which are browser extensions that generate a warning whenever user browses a suspected phishing site. In this research paper, comparison of eight phishing detection tools has been done to find the best one by testing each tool on the dataset, and further an awareness survey was carried out about these tools. Dataset contains two thousand verified phishing websites reported from August 2016 to March 2017 collected from two anti-phishing platforms i.e., Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) and PhishTank, and 500 legitimate websites that are visited by users regularly (i.e., Citibank.com, PayPal.com, Alibaba.com, Askfm.in, etc.) to test the effectiveness of eight popular anti-phishing tools. After testing all the tools on the dataset, it is found that AntiPhishing Toolbar did a very good job at identifying 94.32 percent of phishing as well as legitimate websites from the dataset. An awareness survey has been conducted among fifty M.tech Computer Science & Technology, and Cyber Security pursuing students at Central University of Punjab. The survey revealed that approximately 61 percent respondents are completely unaware about phishing detection tools.