Affiliations: [a] Department of Computer Science, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, India
| [b] Department of Information Technology, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Cochin, India
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author. S. Sarika, Research Scholar, Department of Computer Science, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore 641046, India. Tel.: +91 9947948987; E-mail: sarika.anand08@gmail.com.
Abstract: Internet phishing has become a continual threat that keeps growing day by day. Phishing takes advantage of the user’s trust and use social engineering techniques to deceive them. Despite having several anti-phishing strategies, the threat of phishing is not mitigated as modern types of attack keeps coming to the fore. Nowadays, phishers launch sophisticated phishing attacks which tricks users to submit their credentials by leveraging the facilities tabs offer to web browsers. Browser security is important in this perspective. This paper explains a heuristic method to defend phishing attacks by utilizing software agents for parallel attack recognition. The main focus is on a browser based attack called Tabnabbing which takes action in inactive browser tabs. The proposed method uses agents in three levels to continuously monitor the presence of attack in regular intervals at multiple tabs and warn the user at the earliest. This approach also protects the users against URL obfuscations and malicious links. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the state of the art phishing detection methods and achieves an accuracy of 97.3%.
Keywords: Tabnabbing, intelligent agents, internet security, antiphishing
