The phishing scam and its variants are estimated to cost victims billions of dollars per year. Researchers have responded with a number of anti-phishing systems, based either on blacklists or on heuristics. The former cannot cope with the churn of phishing sites, while the latter usually employ decision rules that are not congruent to human perception. We propose a novel heuristic anti-phishing system that explicitly employs gestalt and decision theory concepts to model perceptual similarity. Our system is evaluated on three corpora contrasting legitimate Web sites with real-world phishing scams. The proposed system’s performance was equal or superior to current best-of-breed systems. We further analyze current anti-phishing warnings from the perspective of warning theory, and propose a new warning design employing our Gestalt approach.

We propose a novel approach for detecting visual similarity between two Web pages. The proposed approach applies Gestalt theory and considers a Web page as a single indivisible entity. The concept of supersignals, as a realization of Gestalt principles, supports our contention that Web pages must be treated as indivisible entities. We objectify, and directly compare, these indivisible supersignals using algorithmic complexity theory. We illustrate our approach by applying it to the problem of detecting phishing scams. Via a large-scale, real-world case study, we demonstrate that 1) our approach effectively detects similar Web pages; and 2) it accuractely distinguishes legitimate and phishing pages.

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