Phishing Infrastructure as a Digital Sovereignty Threat: An Explainable Structural URL Analysis
Keywords:
phishing infrastructure, digital sovereignty, explainable cybersecurity, structural url analysis, cross-border cyber threats, cyber governance, sovereign cyberspaceAbstract
Phishing has evolved into a distributed cyber infrastructure operating across globally interconnected digital environments. Modern phishing campaigns increasingly exploit lexical manipulation, hierarchical domain structures, and cross-border hosting ecosystems to imitate legitimate services while evading conventional detection systems. However, existing phishing research remains predominantly focused on predictive accuracy and deep learning optimization, with limited attention to interpretability, infrastructure behavior, and digital sovereignty implications. This study investigates phishing infrastructures through an explainable structural URL analysis framework while examining their relationship with fragmented cyberspace governance. A quantitative exploratory approach was employed using phishing and legitimate URLs collected from multiple public cybersecurity repositories. Structural feature extraction included URL length, entropy, numerical tokenization, suspicious lexical indicators, HTTPS presence, subdomain complexity, and top-level domain (TLD) distribution. Statistical analysis and explainable Logistic Regression modeling were subsequently applied to identify significant structural phishing characteristics and feature influence patterns. The results demonstrate that phishing URLs exhibit substantially higher lexical complexity, entropy variation, numerical obfuscation, and hierarchical subdomain manipulation compared with legitimate domains. Numerical patterns, suspicious keywords, entropy-related randomness, and structural domain engineering were identified as major contributors to phishing classification. The findings further reveal that several non-.com TLD ecosystems are disproportionately associated with phishing infrastructures, indicating opportunistic exploitation of fragmented and globally distributed governance environments. This study contributes to cybersecurity research by reframing phishing not only as a technical cybercrime issue, but also as a digital sovereignty and governance challenge embedded within transnational cyberspace infrastructures. The findings highlight the importance of explainable and infrastructure-aware cybersecurity approaches for supporting more resilient cross-border cyber governance frameworks.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Achmad Fauzan, Tito Pinandita, Aulia Desy Nur Utomo (Author)
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