Content area

Abstract

Phishing attacks, particularly Smishing (SMS phishing), have become a major cybersecurity threat, with attackers using social engineering tactics to take advantage of human vulnerabilities. Traditional detection models often struggle to keep up with the evolving sophistication of these attacks, especially on devices with constrained computational resources. This research proposes a chain transformer model that integrates GPT-2 for synthetic data generation and BERT for embeddings to detect Smishing within a multiclass dataset, including minority smishing variants. By utilizing compact, open-source transformer models designed to balance accuracy and efficiency, this study explores improved detection of phishing threats on text-based platforms. Experimental results demonstrate an accuracy rate exceeding 97% in detecting phishing attacks across multiple categories. The proposed chained transformer model achieved an F1-score of 0.97, precision of 0.98, and recall of 0.96, indicating strong overall performance.

Details

1009240
Business indexing term
Title
Deep Learning Approaches for Multi-Class Classification of Phishing Text Messages
Publication title
Volume
5
Issue
4
First page
102
Number of pages
17
Publication year
2025
Publication date
2025
Publisher
MDPI AG
Place of publication
Washington
Country of publication
Switzerland
Publication subject
ISSN
2624800X
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2025-11-21
Milestone dates
2025-10-07 (Received); 2025-11-12 (Accepted)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
21 Nov 2025
ProQuest document ID
3286310327
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/deep-learning-approaches-multi-class/docview/3286310327/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2025-12-24
Database
ProQuest One Academic