AI Powered Image Analysis for Phishing Detection

Phishing remains one of the most common vectors for financial and identity fraud, and most detection systems still rely on inspecting a page's URL, HTML markup, or domain registration history. These signals are easy for an attacker to rotate or obfuscate, and they say very little about what actually convinces a victim to hand over a password or a card number: the way the page looks. This paper describes a visual, image-based approach to phishing detection that treats a rendered webpage the same way a human eye would, as a picture that either matches a trusted brand or doesn't. A YOLOv8 convolutional neural network was trained to classify full-page website screenshots as phishing or legitimate based on layout, logo placement, color scheme, and login-form structure, rather than on text extracted from the page. The system reached 92% classification accuracy on a held-out test set, processed a single screenshot in roughly 100 milliseconds, and, after a round of data augmentation aimed specifically at lighting, compression, and scaling variation, cut the false-positive rate by 11% relative to the pre-augmentation baseline. The paper walks through the dataset construction, the augmentation strategy, the model architecture and training setup, and the resulting performance, and closes with a discussion of where this kind of visual detector fits alongside, rather than instead of, existing URL- and content-based defenses.

Phishing remains the most pervasive threat to the Web, enabling large-scale credential theft and financial fraud through deceptive webpages. While recent reference-based and generative-AI-driven phishing detectors achieve strong accuracy, their reliance on external knowledge bases, cloud services, and complex multimodal pipelines fundamentally limits practicality, scalability, and reproducibility. In contrast, conventional deep learning approaches often fail to generalize to evolving phishing campaigns. We introduce SpecularNet, a novel lightweight framework for reference-free web phishing detection that demonstrates how carefully designed compact architectures can rival heavyweight systems. SpecularNet operates solely on the domain name and HTML structure, modeling the Document Object Model (DOM) as a tree and leveraging a hierarchical graph autoencoding architecture with directional, level-wise message passing. This design captures higher-order structural invariants of phishing webpages while enabling fast, end-to-end inference on standard CPUs. Extensive evaluation against 13 state of the art phishing detectors, including leading reference-based systems, shows that SpecularNet achieves competitive detection performance with dramatically lower computational cost. On benchmark datasets, it reaches an F1 score of 93.9%, trailing the best reference-based method slightly while reducing inference time from several seconds to approximately 20 milliseconds per webpage. Field and robustness evaluations further validate SpecularNet in real-world deployments, on a newly collected 2026 open-world dataset, and against adversarial attacks.

Phishing attacks remain a major cybersecurity threat, exploiting deceptive URLs to steal sensitive user information. Traditional blacklist and rule-based detection approaches are reactive and often fail to identify newly emerging phishing URLs. This paper proposes a lightweight hybrid framework for real-time phishing URL detection that combines blacklist-based screening with a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier operating solely on structural URL features. The framework extracts 16 URL-derived features capturing structural, domain-based, and security-related characteristics without requiring webpage content access, third-party APIs, or visual rendering, making it computationally efficient for real-time deployment. The system was trained and evaluated on the PhiUSIIL phishing dataset containing 235,795 labelled URLs. Experimental results show that the proposed MLP achieved 99.24% accuracy, 98.74% precision, 99.95% recall, 99.34% F1-score, and 99.65% ROC-AUC, outperforming Random Forest, Logistic Regression, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost under the same evaluation setting. The hybrid architecture achieved an average inference latency of 1.2 ms per URL and a peak throughput of 4,200 URLs per second under concurrent processing. A functional desktop application prototype, CyberGuard, further demonstrates deployment viability. The results indicate that the proposed framework provides an accurate and computationally efficient solution for real-time phishing URL detection in resource-constrained environments.