Using Natural Language Processing for Phishing Detection

We live in a world where computers are constantly changing the way we do things. People spend many hours on their phones or computers, whether it be for work or leisure purposes. The danger is that these unsuspecting users can be targeted for attacks at any time and can fall victim to many types of scams or phishing attacks. These attacks can be harmful to the user by getting valuable credentials, money or even installing malicious software on their devices, all while the user is unaware of what has just happened. In a business environment these can lead to mass data breeches which could end up costing a company millions of euros. Many users are not trained to recognize phishing texts, so an alternative solution is needed to help prevent users from falling into these traps. In this paper we will be investigating Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subsection of Machine Learning (ML) to try generate solutions to the problem of phishing. We will investigating different NLP solutions: Word2Vec, Doc2Vec and BERT, and different ML solutions: RNN, LSTM, CNN and TD-IDF. All of these different approaches provide good classification results ranging from f1-scores of 90.03–98.94.