Fake Websites Detection Improvement Using Multi-Layer Artificial Neural Network Classifier with Ant Lion Optimizer Algorithm

In phishing attacks, a fake site is forged from the main site, which looks very similar to the original one. To direct users to these sites, Phishers or online thieves usually put fake links in emails and send them to their victims, and try to deceive users with social engineering methods and persuade them to click on fake links. Phishing attacks have significant financial losses, and most attacks focus on banks and financial gateways. Machine learning methods are an effective way to detect phishing attacks, but this is subject to selecting the optimal feature. Feature selection allows only important features to be considered as learning input and reduces the detection error of phishing attacks. In the proposed method, a multilayer artificial neural network classifier is used to reduce the detection error of phishing attacks, the feature selection phase is performed by the ant lion optimization (ALO) algorithm. Evaluations and experiments on the Rami dataset, which is related to phishing, show that the proposed method has an accuracy of about 98.53% and has less error than the multilayer artificial neural network. The proposed method is more accurate in detecting phishing attacks than BPNN, SVM, NB, C4.5, RF, and kNN learning methods with feature selection mechanism by PSO algorithm.