Comparison of the Performance of Machine Learning Classification Algorithms on Phishing URL Detection

Abstract

The development of internet technology has increased the intensity of digital activities, but it has also been followed by an increase in cybersecurity threats, one of which is phishing attacks through malicious URLs. Phishing is a fraudulent method that is carried out by manipulating users through fake websites that resemble official websites to obtain sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and financial data. Conventional blacklist-based detection methods are considered less effective in recognizing new phishing URLs that continue to develop dynamically. Therefore, this study aims to analyze and compare the performance of various machine learning and deep learning algorithms in accurately detecting phishing URLs. The dataset used was obtained from Kaggle with a total of 11,054 data points and 31 features that represent the characteristics of phishing and legitimate URLs. The methods used include Logistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, CatBoost, Extreme Gradient Boosting, and Multilayer Perceptron. The research stages include data preprocessing, exploratory data analysis, data visualization, separation of training and testing data, model training, and performance evaluation using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The results showed that the Gradient Boosting algorithm provided the best performance with an accuracy of 0.974, an F1-score of 0.977, a recall of 0.994, and a precision of 0.986. The results show that the ensemble learning method is able to detect phishing URLs effectively and can be used to improve artificial intelligence-based cybersecurity systems.