Dynamic Online Identification and Countermeasures against Phishing Vectors

Abstract

Phishing remains a critical network threat whereattackers deploy deceptive web pages—often distributed viaengineered emails or instant messages—to trick users intosurrendering credentials and financial data. In this paper, weintroduce LinkGuard, a novel end-host anti-phishing algorithmdesigned around the structural characteristics of phishinghyperlinks. Derived from analyzing the Anti-Phishing WorkingGroup (APWG) repository, these foundational traits allowLinkGuard to identify both known and zero-day phishing attempts.Implemented on Windows OS, our experimental evaluationdemonstrates that LinkGuard effectively detects 195 out of 203real-world phishing attacks with minimal false negatives.Furthermore, the light-weight architecture achieves real-timedetection and prevention without causing performance bottlenecks.