ML-SPAs: Fortifying Healthcare Cybersecurity Leveraging Varied Machine Learning Approaches against Spear Phishing Attacks

Spear Phishing Attacks (SPAs) pose a significant threat to the healthcare sector, resulting in data breaches, financial losses, and compromised patient confidentiality. Traditional defenses, such as firewalls and antivirus software, often fail to counter these sophisticated attacks, which target human vulnerabilities. To strengthen defenses, healthcare organizations are increasingly adopting Machine Learning (ML) techniques. ML-based SPA defenses use advanced algorithms to analyze various features, including email content, sender behavior, and attachments, to detect potential threats. This capability enables proactive security measures that address risks in real-time. The interpretability of ML models fosters trust and allows security teams to continuously refine these algorithms as new attack methods emerge. Implementing ML techniques requires integrating diverse data sources, such as electronic health records, email logs, and incident reports, which enhance the algorithms’ learning environment. Feedback from end-users further improves model performance. Among tested models, the hierarchical models, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) achieved the highest accuracy at 99.99%, followed closely by the sequential Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model at 99.94%. In contrast, the traditional Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model showed an accuracy of 98.46%. This difference underscores the superior performance of advanced sequential and hierarchical models in detecting SPAs compared to traditional approaches.