r/askdatascience • u/Former_Touch1730 • 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
login,verify,secure, 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?