Abstract

Phishing is one of the most effective ways in which cybercriminals get sensitive details such as credentials for online banking, digital wallets, state secrets, and many more from potential victims. They do this by spamming users with malicious URLs with the sole purpose of tricking them into divulging sensitive information which is later used for various cybercrimes. In this research, we did a comprehensive review of current state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning phishing detection techniques to expose their vulnerabilities and future research direction. For better analysis and observation, we split machine learning techniques into Bayesian, non-Bayesian, and deep learning. We reviewed the most recent advances in Bayesian and non-Bayesian-based classifiers before exploiting their cor- responding weaknesses to indicate future research direction. While exploiting weaknesses in both Bayesian and non-Bayesian classifiers, we also compared each performance with a deep learning classifier. For a proper review of deep learning-based classifiers, we looked at Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and Long Short Term Memory Networks (LSTMs). We did an empirical analysis to evaluate the performance of each classifier along with many of the proposed state-of-the-art anti-phishing techniques to identify future research directions, we also made a series of proposals on how the performance of the under-performing algorithm can improved in addition to a two-stage prediction model