The phishing attack is one of the most complex threats that have put internet users and legitimate web resource owners at risk. The recent rise in the number of phishing attacks has instilled distrust in legitimate internet users, making them feel less safe even in the presence of powerful antivirus apps. Reports of a rise in financial damages as a result of phishing website attacks have caused grave concern. Several methods, including blacklists and machine learning-based models, have been proposed to combat phishing website attacks. The blacklist antiphishing method has been faulted for failure to detect new phishing URLs due to its reliance on compiled blacklisted phishing URLs. Many ML methods for detecting phishing websites have been reported with relatively low detection accuracy and high false alarm. Hence, this research proposed a Functional Tree (FT) based metalearning models for detecting phishing websites. That is, this study investigated improving the phishing website detection using empirical analysis of FT and its variants. The proposed models outperformed baseline classifiers, meta-learners and hybrid models that are used for phishing websites detection in existing studies. Besides, the proposed FT based meta-learners are effective for detecting legitimate and phishing websites with accuracy as high as 98.51% and a false positive rate as low as 0.015. Hence, the deployment and adoption of FT and its metalearner variants for phishing website detection and applicable cybersecurity attacks are recommended.

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As a result of advancements in technology and technological devices, data is now spawned at an infinite rate, emanating from a vast array of networks, devices, and daily operations like credit card transactions and mobile phones. Datastream entails sequential and real-time continuous data in the inform of evolving stream. However, the traditional machine learning approach is characterized by a batch learning model. Labeled training data are given apriori to train a model based on some machine learning algorithms. This technique necessitates the entire training sample to be readily accessible before the learning process. The training procedure is mainly done offline in this setting due to the high training cost. Consequently, the traditional batch learning technique suffers severe drawbacks, such as poor scalability for real-time phishing websites detection. The model mostly requires re-training from scratch using new training samples. This paper presents the application of streaming algorithms for detecting malicious URLs based on selected online learners: Hoeffding Tree (HT), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Ozabag. Ozabag produced promising results in terms of accuracy, Kappa and Kappa Temp on the dataset with large samples while HT and NB have the least prediction time with comparable accuracy and Kappa with Ozabag algorithm for the real-time detection of phishing websites.

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