Phishing is a type of social engineering attack with an intention to steal user data, including login credentials and credit card numbers, leading to financial losses for both organizations and individuals. It occurs when an attacker, pretending as a trusted entity, lure a victim into click on a link or attachment in an email, or in a text message. Phishing is often launched via email messages or text messages over social networks. Previous research has revealed that phishing attacks can be identified just by looking at uniform resource locator (URLs). Identifying the techniques which are used by phishers to mimic a phishing URL is rather a challenging issue. At present, we have limited knowledge and understanding of how cyber‐criminals attempt to mimic URLs with the same look and feel of the legitimate ones, to entice people into clicking links. Therefore, this paper investigates the feature selection of phishing URLs (uniform resource locators), aiming to explore the strategies employed by phishers to mimic URLs that can obviously trick people into clicking links. We employed an information gain (IG) and Chi‐Squared feature selection methods in machine learning (ML) on a phishing dataset. The dataset contains a total of 48 features extracted from 5000 phishing and another 5000 legitimate URL from web pages downloaded from January to May 2015 and from May to June 2017. Our results revealed that there were 10 techniques that phishers used to mimic URLs to manipulate humans into clicking links. Identifying these phishing URL manipulation techniques would certainly help to educate individuals and organizations and keep them safe from phishing attacks. In addition, the findings of this research will also help develop anti‐phishing tools, framework or browser plugins for phishing prevention.

Blockchain is a digital technology built on three pillars: decentralization, transparency and immutability. Bitcoin and Ethereum are two prevalent Blockchain platforms, where the participants are globally connected in a peer-to-peer manner and anonymously perform trade electronically. The vast number of decentralized transactions and the pseudo-anonymity of participants open the door for scams, cyber frauds, hacks, money laundering and fraudulent transactions. It is challenging to detect such fraudulent activities using traditional auditing techniques, since they need more processing power, time and memory for complex queries to join combinations of tables. This paper proposes several algorithms to extract the transactionrelated features from the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks and to represent the features as graphs. Moreover, the paper discusses how visualisation of graphs can reflect the anomalies and patterns of fraudulent activities.

The software and hardware applications are clearly on the way of becoming an integral tool of business, communication and popular culture in many parts of the world. People are interacting with the environment via the Internet to perform physical activities remotely. These applications are hosted in the public or private servers under the control of the server admin. The users’ online usage data can be stored in public or private cloud platforms, used for processing and monitoring users’ online behaviour and emotional factors and shared with third parties to facilitate making their business decisions. When users allow their data to be collected via software applications and mobile devices, users need to have some level of trust and control over their data. But, software applications or mobile devices connected to the cloud server using client–server architecture does not ensure the reliability, security and integrity among their data. To get over these kinds of limitations, we propose a database management system using blockchain technology that can be used by any software applications. The blockchain database connected to the cloud server can be used to increase the trustfulness of the application. Blockchain has the capability to provide decentralization, immutability and owner-controlled digital assets among software applications. Since users can save their data in a shared transaction repository with tamper-resistant records, it enables related parties to access and control users’ data without the need for a central control system.

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