BERT-PhishFinder: A Robust Model for Accurate Phishing URL Detection With Optimized DistilBERT
Ali Aljofey, Saifullahi Aminu Bello, Jian Jiang Lu, Chen Xu · IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · 2025
Phishing URL detection has become a critical challenge in cybersecurity, with existing methods often struggling to maintain high accuracy while generalizing across diverse datasets. In this article, we introduce BERT-PhishFinder, a novel and efficient transformer-based model designed to tackle this problem. While most traditional approaches rely heavily on lexical features or complex convolutional architectures, BERT-PhishFinder leverages the power of DistilBERT, a lightweight yet highly effective transformer, to capture rich contextual representations of URL sequences. To enhance the model’s robustness and reduce overfitting, we strategically incorporate SpatialDropout1D in the embedding layers, along with global average pooling and global max pooling techniques to extract both comprehensive and key discriminative features. The pooled representations are thoughtfully concatenated to form a comprehensive feature representation. Through this carefully crafted design, our model adopts ensemble learning, as it undergoes multiple parallel dense layers, each with distinct parameters and dropout regularization. This facilitates learning diverse patterns and features from the input URL sequence, culminating in exceptional phishing URL detection performance. Extensive evaluations against conventional deep learning algorithms, transformer models (XLNet, RoBERTa, ALBERT), and other existing methods on five benchmark datasets show that BERT-PhishFinder not only achieves the state of-the-art real phishing URL detection but also accomplishes this with reduced label dependency.