Abstract:

Nowadays, one of the major internet security problems being faced is ‘Web Phishing’, whereby attackers get hold of the personal and sensitive information of the internet users. Sometimes, attackers create fake web pages just to mislead users and give them wrong information. With the increase of more and more sophisticated attacks like Whale Phishing, Spear Phishing, and Ransomware among others, internet users easily fall in attackers’ traps. Most web browsers are not able to counteract or block these attacks and hence internet users consider the spoofed webpages to be legitimate ones and end up giving their details like credit cards details, passwords and usernames among others. In this paper, an application has been developed in Java that performs several tests on a URL, on the different hyperlinks present on the web page and on the content of the web page and provides a security rating to the internet user. Together with the percentage security, the user is informed if the web page is safe, doubtful or unsafe. The security ratings of several website domains such as, .gov, .co, .edu, .info, .mu, .ac, .org, .net, .com were also  analysed. Furthermore, tests using independent samples ANOVA and Tukey HSD were performed and they revealed that there was a significant difference between the security ratings of the websites.

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