
Detect email fraud risk with machine learning has become more important than ever before. These emails are used to trick unsuspecting users into revealing sensitive information that attackers can use to victimize them or breach company cybersecurity systems. To combat this growing threat, organizations must rely on advanced technology tools to identify suspicious email patterns and flag them for closer examination.
Deep learning (DL) algorithms have shown promising performance across various classification tasks, including text categorization, sentiment analysis, and phishing detection. These algorithms are capable of extracting features directly from raw data and can perform complex operations with large amounts of data. However, DL is relatively new and requires more research to understand how these models work and what parameters can be adjusted for better results.
Email Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning Models
This study aims to use a set of public datasets to test and evaluate various DL algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU) models. The datasets were accessed in CSV file format and processed using Python code to identify and extract relevant features for phishing and non-phishing emails. The data were then split into training and test datasets for model evaluation.
Several DL models were evaluated on the data and the best performers were selected. Each model was tested on the phishing and non-phishing datasets to determine its accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The final model was trained and saved for future use. The next step was to observe the standard structural details of a typical Gmail email by analyzing the headers of the sample emails. For example, an incoming email from Gmail is typically accompanied by the headers X-GM-Message-State and X-Google-Smtp-Source. If an email does not have these headers, it may indicate a phishing attack.
