Abstract
Four supervised machine learning algorithms were used in building social
engineering attack prevention models i.e. Support Vector machines,
Logistic Regression, Bayesian Network and Random Forest. The efficacy of
the models was ascertained by the help of three datasets (one synthetic
and two real-life). The performances of the machine learning methods
were compared using F1-score, accuracy, Matthew’s Correlation
Coefficient, Precision and Sensitivity. The usefulness of each dataset
was also compared per machine learning technique to draw relevant
conclusions. Results from the experimental set-up showed that SVM
demonstrates greater resilience in preventing mobile money fraud attacks
as compared to the other algorithms. Again, even though real datasets
are complex and utilize greater system resources during model training
and testing, they help in building more effective social engineering
attack prevention models than other datasets that are obtained from
synthetic sources.