Phishing is a potential web threat that includes mimicking official websites to trick users by stealing their important information such as username and password related to financial systems. The attackers use social engineering techniques like email, SMS and malware to fraud the users. Due to the potential financial losses caused by phishing, it is essential to find effective approaches for phishing websites detection. This paper proposes a hybrid approach for classifying the websites as Phishing, Legitimate or Suspicious websites, the proposed approach intelligently combines the K-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm with the Support Vector Machine algorithm (SVM) in two stages. Firstly, the K-NN was utilized as and robust to noisy data and effective classifier. Secondly, the SVM is employed as powerful classifier. The proposed approach integrates the simplicity of KNN with the effectiveness of SVM. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid approach achieved the highest accuracy of 90.04% when compared with other approaches.

The continuous development of network technologies plays a major role in increasing the utilization of these technologies in many aspects of our lives, including e-commerce, electronic banking, social media, e-health, and e-learning. In recent times, phishing websites have emerged as a major cybersecurity threat. Phishing websites are fake web pages that are created by hackers to mimic the web pages of real websites to deceive people and steal their private information, such as account usernames and passwords. Accurate detection of phishing websites is a challenging problem because it depends on several dynamic factors. Ensemble methods are considered the state-of-the-art solution for many classification tasks. Ensemble learning combines the predictions of several separate classifiers to obtain a higher performance than a single classifier. This paper proposes an intelligent ensemble learning approach for phishing website detection based on weighted soft voting to enhance the detection of phishing websites. First, a base classifier consisting of four heterogeneous machine-learning algorithms was utilized to classify the websites as phishing or legitimate websites. Second, a novel weighted soft voting method based on Kappa statistics was employed to assign greater weights of influence to stronger base learners and lower weights of influence to weaker base learners, and then integrate the results of each classifier based on the soft weighted voting to differentiate between phishing websites and legitimate websites. The experiments were conducted using the publicly available phishing website dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, which consists of 4898 phishing websites and 6157 legitimate websites. The experimental results showed that the suggested intelligent approach for phishing website detection outperformed the base classifiers and soft voting method and achieved the highest accuracy of 95% and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 98.8%.

The continuous increase in Android malware applications (apps) represents a significant danger to the privacy and security of users’ information. Therefore, effective and efficient Android malware app-classification techniques are needed. This paper presents a method for Android malware classification using optimized ensemble learning based on genetic algorithms. The suggested method is divided into two steps. First, a base learner is used to handle various machine learning algorithms, including support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), gradient boosting (GB), decision tree (DT), and AdaBoost (ADA) classifiers. Second, a meta learner RF-GA, utilizing genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize the parameters of a random forest (RF) algorithm, is employed to classify the prediction probabilities from the base learner. The genetic algorithm is used to optimize the parameter settings in the RF algorithm in order to obtain the highest Android malware classification accuracy. The effectiveness of the proposed method was examined on a dataset consisting of 5560 Android malware apps and 9476 goodware apps. The experimental results demonstrate that the suggested ensemble-learning strategy for classifying Android malware apps, which is based on an optimized random forest using genetic algorithms, outperformed the other methods and achieved the highest accuracy (94.15%), precision (94.15%), and area under the curve (AUC) (98.10%).