Kambey L. Kisambu and Mohamedi Mjahidi, University of Dodoma, Tanzania

Malicious software, commonly known as Malware is one of the most significant threats facing Internet users today. Malware-based phishing attacks are among the major threats to Internet users that are difficult to defend against because they do not appear to be malicious in nature. There were several initiatives in combating phishing attacks but there are many difficulties and obstacles encountered. This study deals with evaluation of machine learning algorithms in detection of malware-based phishing attacks for securing email communication. It deeply evaluate the efficacy of the algorithms when integrated with major open-source security mail filters with different mitigation techniques. The main classifiers used such as SVM, KNN, Logistic Regression and Naïve Bayes were evaluated using performance metrics namely accuracy, precision, recall and f-score. Based on the findings, the study proposed improvement for securing e-mail communication against malware-based phishing using the best performing machine-learning algorithm to keep pace with malware evolution.

Malware, Malware Analysis, Malware-based, Phishing attacks, Spams, e-mails, Machine learning, algorithms, mail filters, Detection, Mitigation techniques.