Recent survey of various defense mechanisms against phishing attacks

ABSTRACT In the recent years, the phishing attack has become one of the most serious threats faced by Internet users, organizations, and service providers. In a phishing attack, the attacker tries to defraud Internet users and steal their personal information either by using spoofed emails or by using fake websites or both. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature for the detection and filtering of phishing attacks; however, the Internet community is still looking for a complete solution to secure the Internet from these attacks. This article discusses recent developments and protection mechanisms (i.e., detection and filtering) against a variety of phishing attacks (e.g., email phishing, website phishing, zero-day attacks). In addition, the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches is discussed. This article provides a better understanding of the phishing attack problem in the current solution space and also addresses the scope of future research to deal with such attacks efficiently.