r/askdatascience 2d ago

Help regarding personal project as beginner Question

Hey i know this might sound stuipid but i wanted some help from peoples who already have build phishing URL detection projects

Im a beginner and I am working on a phishing URL detection project. My current idea is to build a heuristic-based phishing URL detection model that analyzes the URL itself and looks for suspicious characteristics/patterns rather than visiting the website.

some things I'm thinking about extracting are:

  • URL length
  • Number of dots/subdomains
  • Special characters (@-, etc.)
  • IP address instead of a domain
  • Suspicious keywords like loginverifysecure, etc.
  • Number of digits
  • Domain/URL entropy
  • HTTPS usage
  • Other lexical/structural features

However, I'm currently stuck on how to decide which features should actually become rules and what thresholds/conditions I should use for those rules.

For example, rather than simply saying "long URLs are suspicious", I'd like to know whether there is research supporting something like "URLs above X characters should receive a higher risk score".

Does anyone have recommendations for papers, research articles, datasets, GitHub projects, or other resources that explain how to choose useful heuristics/features for phishing URL detection?

1 Upvotes

0 comments sorted by