Free-Phish: detecting phishing websites hosted on free web hosting domains
Rohit Lohar, Meenakshi Tripathi, Hossein Mozdorani Shirazi · International Journal of Computers and Applications · 2025
Phishing attacks have changed over time, and a family of phishing websites hosted over free web hosting domains (FHDs) are increasing. These can be created and maintained at scale with minimal effort while also effectively evading prevalent anti-phishing detection and resisting website takedowns. Their coverage time is also slower; hence, it's challenging for anti- phishing tools to catch them. From August 2022 to April 2023, more than 5,000 of these FHD URLs were observed on phish- tank.com and openphish.com by 41 different FHD providers. This paper investigates a family of phishing websites hosted on free web hosting domains (FHDs). We have developed an updated dataset containing both FHD and non-FHD URLs. While we leveraged some pre-existing features, we also introduced two novel features unique to this study. This work provides the first comprehensive study focused on distinguishing FHD and non-FHD URLs, filling a notable gap in the literature. Our dataset comprises 4,922 recently collected FHD URLs and 5,010 non-FHD URLs. By employing a multilayer perceptron neural network with 32 features, we achieved an impressive accuracy rate of 96.5% for identifying FHD URLs. Additionally, using a random forest classifier, we achieved an accuracy of 97.7% for non-FHD URLs.