Phishing Detection through Email Embeddings

Abstract: The problem of detecting phishing emails through machine learning techniques has been discussed extensively in the literature. Conventional and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms have demonstrated the possibility of building classifiers with high accuracy. The existing research studies treat phishing and genuine emails through general indicators and thus it is not exactly clear what phishing features are contributing to variations of the classifiers. In this paper, we crafted a set of phishing and legitimate emails with similar indicators in order to investigate whether these cues are captured or disregarded by email embeddings, i.e., vectorizations. We then fed machine learning classifiers with the carefully crafted emails to find out about the performance of email embeddings developed. Our results show that using these indicators, email embeddings techniques is effective for classifying emails as phishing or legitimate.