  In this paper, we present a general scheme for building reproducible and
extensible datasets for website phishing detection. The aim is to (1) enable
comparison of systems using different features, (2) overtake the short-lived
nature of phishing websites, and (3) keep track of the evolution of phishing
tactics. For experimenting the proposed scheme, we start by adopting a refined
classification of website phishing features and we systematically select a
total of 87 commonly recognized ones, we classify them, and we made them
subjects for relevance and runtime analysis. We use the collected set of
features to build a dataset in light of the proposed scheme. Thereafter, we use
a conceptual replication approach to check the genericity of former findings
for the built dataset. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of classifiers
on individual classes and on combinations of classes, we investigate different
combinations of models, and we explore the effects of filter and wrapper
methods on the selection of discriminative features. The results show that
Random Forest is the most predictive classifier. Features gathered from
external services are found the most discriminative where features extracted
from web page contents are found less distinguishing. Besides external service
based features, some web page content features are found time consuming and not
suitable for runtime detection. The use of hybrid features provided the best
accuracy score of 96.61%. By investigating different feature selection methods,
filter-based ranking together with incremental removal of less important
features improved the performance up to 96.83% better than wrapper methods.
