Phishing the Phishers with SpecularNet: Hierarchical Graph Autoencoding for Reference-Free Web Phishing Detection

Researchers developed SpecularNet, a lightweight AI framework for detecting phishing websites that operates without external databases or cloud services. The system achieves 93.9% F1 score while reducing inference time from several seconds to 20 milliseconds per webpage, making it practical for real-world deployment.

• →SpecularNet detects phishing websites using only domain names and HTML structure without requiring external knowledge bases
• →The framework achieves competitive 93.9% F1 score performance while being dramatically faster than existing methods
• →Inference time is reduced from several seconds to approximately 20 milliseconds per webpage analysis
• →The system uses hierarchical graph autoencoding to model webpage DOM structures for pattern recognition
• →Evaluation against 13 state-of-the-art detectors shows SpecularNet rivals heavyweight systems with lower computational cost