ISHO: improved spotted hyena optimization algorithm for phishing website detection

Abstract

One of the major challenges in cyber space and Internet of things (IoT) environments is the existence of fake or phishing websites that steal users’ information. A website as a multimedia system provides access to different types of data such as text, image, video, audio. Each type of these data are prune to be used by fishers to perform a phishing attack. In phishing attacks, people are directed to fake pages and their important information is stolen by a thief or phisher. Machine learning and data mining algorithms are the widely used algorithms for classifying websites and detecting phishing attacks. Classification accuracy is highly dependent on the feature selection method employed to choose appropriate features for classification. In this research, an improved spotted hyena optimization algorithm (ISHO algorithm) is proposed to select proper features for classifying phishing websites through support vector machine. The proposed ISHO algorithm outperformed the standard spotted hyena optimization algorithm with better accuracy. In addition, the results indicate the superiority of ISHO algorithm to three other meta-heuristic algorithms including particle swarm optimization, firefly algorithm, and bat algorithm. The proposed algorithm is also compared with a number of classification algorithms proposed before on the same dataset.