Context-Aware Phishing Email Detection Using Machine Learning and NLP
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27326v1
- Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:13:48 GMT
- Title: Context-Aware Phishing Email Detection Using Machine Learning and NLP
- Abstract summary: This paper presents a machine learning-based phishing email detection system.<n>The system classifies emails by extracting contextual features from the entire email content.<n>The system was deployed as a web application with a FastAPI backend, providing real-time phishing classification with average response times of 127ms.
- Score: 0.13999481573773068
- License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
- Abstract: Phishing attacks remain among the most prevalent cybersecurity threats, causing significant financial losses for individuals and organizations worldwide. This paper presents a machine learning-based phishing email detection system that analyzes email body content using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Unlike existing approaches that primarily focus on URL analysis, our system classifies emails by extracting contextual features from the entire email content. We evaluated two classification models, Naive Bayes and Logistic Regression, trained on a combined corpus of 53,973 labeled emails from three distinct datasets. Our preprocessing pipeline incorporates lowercasing, tokenization, stop-word removal, and lemmatization, followed by Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) feature extraction with unigrams and bigrams. Experimental results demonstrate that Logistic Regression achieves 95.41% accuracy with an F1-score of 94.33%, outperforming Naive Bayes by 1.55 percentage points. The system was deployed as a web application with a FastAPI backend, providing real-time phishing classification with average response times of 127ms.
Related papers
- Fantastic Adaptive Taxonomies and How to Use Them [100.20614173157708]
AdaMAST converts execution traces into a compact, evidence-grounded failure taxonomy.<n>No code is hand-authored, no trace human-annotated.<n>In agent-system search, taxonomy-coded diagnoses of failed candidates outperform free-form.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-07-17T17:41:16Z) - AutoMalDesc: Large-Scale Script Analysis for Cyber Threat Research [81.04845910798387]
Generating natural language explanations for threat detections remains an open problem in cybersecurity research.<n>We present AutoMalDesc, an automated static analysis summarization framework that operates independently at scale.<n>We publish our complete dataset of more than 100K script samples, including annotated seed (0.9K) datasets, along with our methodology and evaluation framework.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-11-17T13:05:25Z) - Robust ML-based Detection of Conventional, LLM-Generated, and Adversarial Phishing Emails Using Advanced Text Preprocessing [3.3166006294048427]
We propose a robust phishing email detection system featuring an enhanced text preprocessing pipeline.<n>Our approach integrates widely adopted natural language processing (NLP) feature extraction techniques and machine learning algorithms.<n>We evaluate our models on publicly available datasets comprising both phishing and legitimate emails, achieving a detection accuracy of 94.26% and F1-score of 84.39%.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-13T20:34:19Z) - Dual-Path Phishing Detection: Integrating Transformer-Based NLP with Structural URL Analysis [0.0]
Phishing emails pose a persistent and increasingly sophisticated threat.<n>Traditional detection methods fail to comprehensively address these evolving attacks.<n>We propose a dual-path phishing detection framework that integrates natural language processing (NLP) with classical machine learning.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-09-25T10:17:12Z) - Characterizing Phishing Pages by JavaScript Capabilities [77.64740286751834]
This paper aims to aid researchers and analysts by automatically differentiating groups of phishing pages based on the underlying kit.<n>For kit detection, our system has an accuracy of 97% on a ground-truth dataset of 548 kit families deployed across 4,562 phishing URLs.<n>We find that UI interactivity and basic fingerprinting are universal techniques, present in 90% and 80% of the clusters.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-09-16T15:39:23Z) - MeAJOR Corpus: A Multi-Source Dataset for Phishing Email Detection [1.554831836850549]
This paper presents MeAJOR, a novel, multi-source phishing email dataset.<n>It integrates 135894 samples representing a broad number of phishing tactics and legitimate emails.<n>By integrating broad features from multiple categories, our dataset provides a reusable and consistent resource.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-07-23T22:57:08Z) - Prompted Contextual Vectors for Spear-Phishing Detection [41.26408609344205]
Spear-phishing attacks present a significant security challenge.<n>We propose a detection approach based on a novel document vectorization method.<n>Our method achieves a 91% F1 score in identifying LLM-generated spear-phishing emails.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-02-13T09:12:55Z) - Profiler: Profile-Based Model to Detect Phishing Emails [15.109679047753355]
We propose a multidimensional risk assessment of emails to reduce the feasibility of an attacker adapting their email and avoiding detection.
We develop a risk assessment framework that includes three models which analyse an email's (1) threat level, (2) cognitive manipulation, and (3) email type.
Our Profiler can be used in conjunction with ML approaches, to reduce their misclassifications or as a labeller for large email data sets in the training stage.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2022-08-18T10:01:55Z) - Anomaly Detection in Emails using Machine Learning and Header
Information [0.0]
Anomalies in emails such as phishing and spam present major security risks.
Previous studies on email anomaly detection relied on a single type of anomaly and the analysis of the email body and subject content.
This study conducted feature extraction and selection on email header datasets and leveraged both multi and one-class anomaly detection approaches.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2022-03-19T23:31:23Z) - Deep convolutional forest: a dynamic deep ensemble approach for spam
detection in text [219.15486286590016]
This paper introduces a dynamic deep ensemble model for spam detection that adjusts its complexity and extracts features automatically.
As a result, the model achieved high precision, recall, f1-score and accuracy of 98.38%.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2021-10-10T17:19:37Z) - Robust and Verifiable Information Embedding Attacks to Deep Neural
Networks via Error-Correcting Codes [81.85509264573948]
In the era of deep learning, a user often leverages a third-party machine learning tool to train a deep neural network (DNN) classifier.
In an information embedding attack, an attacker is the provider of a malicious third-party machine learning tool.
In this work, we aim to design information embedding attacks that are verifiable and robust against popular post-processing methods.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2020-10-26T17:42:42Z) - Uncertainty-aware Self-training for Text Classification with Few Labels [54.13279574908808]
We study self-training as one of the earliest semi-supervised learning approaches to reduce the annotation bottleneck.
We propose an approach to improve self-training by incorporating uncertainty estimates of the underlying neural network.
We show our methods leveraging only 20-30 labeled samples per class for each task for training and for validation can perform within 3% of fully supervised pre-trained language models.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2020-06-27T08:13:58Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.