The problem of phishing attacks continues to demand new solutions as existing solutions are limited by various challenges such as high computational requirements, zero-day attacks, needs for updates, complex ruled-based, etc. Besides, the emerging mobile market demands simple solutions to phishing due to several factors such as memory, fragmentation, etc. In response to the above challenges, a simple anti-phishing tool called LinkCalculator is presented. The proposed LinkCalculator anti-phishing scheme is based on an algorithm designed to extract link characteristics from loading URLs to determine their legitimacy. Unlike the other link-based extraction approaches, the proposed approach introduced the concept of weight to represent the different links found in a URL. This is because certain link information within parsed webpages or requests is sufficient to classify them as phishing without loss of generality. The approach is experimented using a dataset of 300 instances consisting of 150 legitimate URLs and 150 phishing URLs from openly-available research datasets. The experimental results indicate a significance performance of 100%. True Negative Rate and 0.00% False Positive Rate for legitimate instances and True Positive Rate of 96.67% with 0.03 % False Negative Rate for phishing instances which indicate that the approach offers a more efficient lightweight approach to phishing detection.

Ever since the first Short Message Service (SMS) service was introduced in 1993, its popularity has continued to soar over the years such that SMS communication now constitutes a major segment in the spectrum of telecommunication. The popularity and extensive usage has attracted the interest of many researchers to the inherent potential in harvesting data and metadata from collection of SMS corpus for the performance of linguistic, diachronic, normalization and sociolinguistic studies and also in the validation and comparison of different classifiers in SMS spam filters. However, freely available dataset where this type of information can be found for research purposes are quite difficult to obtain. This is mostly due to the confidentiality of SMS where users want to reveal as little of the contents of their phones as possible. This paper is geared towards the examination of the techniques adopted in the creation of SMS corpus and the ethical consideration involved in the protection of users' interest and privacy. For a successful SMS corpus creation, a main consideration is the requirement to protect the rights and interests of the message donors and any other person mentioned in the text messages, without altering the original text in order to gather sufficient metadata information. A review of existing work in the field was done to ascertain ethical observations adopted. Participant consent, data anonymization, and ensuring participants' safe information storage are basic ethical consideration adopted to ensure a successful SMS corpus creation.