  Phishing is a major problem on the Web. Despite the significant attention it
has received over the years, there has been no definitive solution. While the
state-of-the-art solutions have reasonably good performance, they require a
large amount of training data and are not adept at detecting phishing attacks
against new targets. In this paper, we begin with two core observations: (a)
although phishers try to make a phishing webpage look similar to its target,
they do not have unlimited freedom in structuring the phishing webpage; and (b)
a webpage can be characterized by a small set of key terms; how these key terms
are used in different parts of a webpage is different in the case of legitimate
and phishing webpages. Based on these observations, we develop a phishing
detection system with several notable properties: it is language-independent,
can be implemented entirely on client-side, has excellent classification
performance and is fast. In addition, we developed a target identification
component that can identify the target website that a phishing webpage is
attempting to mimic. The target detection component is faster than previously
reported systems and can help minimize false positives in our phishing
detection system.
