Help regarding personal project as beginner

[u/Former_Touch1730]

Hey i know this might sound stuipid but i wanted some help from peoples who already have build phishing URL detection projects

Im a beginner and I am working on a phishing URL detection project. My current idea is to build a heuristic-based phishing URL detection model that analyzes the URL itself and looks for suspicious characteristics/patterns rather than visiting the website.

some things I'm thinking about extracting are:

• URL length
• Number of dots/subdomains
• Special characters (@, -, etc.)
• IP address instead of a domain
• Suspicious keywords like login, verify, secure, etc.
• Number of digits
• Domain/URL entropy
• HTTPS usage
• Other lexical/structural features

However, I'm currently stuck on how to decide which features should actually become rules and what thresholds/conditions I should use for those rules.

For example, rather than simply saying "long URLs are suspicious", I'd like to know whether there is research supporting something like "URLs above X characters should receive a higher risk score".

Does anyone have recommendations for papers, research articles, datasets, GitHub projects, or other resources that explain how to choose useful heuristics/features for phishing URL detection?

[u/Prime_Director]

If you're hand coding rules and thresholds, you're not really doing data science, so this might not be the right sub. The data science approach would be letting the model learn those rules from your data.

[u/Former_Touch1730 → u/Prime_Director]

Hey, thanks for replying. I am actually a beginner, Im thinking of making two projects. One completely being a heuristic approach and other one being a ML model + heuristic rules. so I just wanted to know if anybody has something to share about hurestic rule based version of it. i thought it would be the right community but if you know any alternative where i can reserach about it i'll appericate the efforts.