The main objective of Certificate Transparency (CT) is to detect mis-issued certificates or rouge certificate authorities. It has been observed that phishing sites have been increasingly acquiring certificates to look more legitimate and reach more victims, thus providing an opportunity to predict phishing domains early. The present disclosure provides systems and methods for early detection of phishing and benign domain traces in CT logs. The provided system may predict phishing domains early even before content is available via time-, issuer-, and certificate-based characteristics that are used to identify sets of CT-based inexpensive and novel features. The CT-features are augmented with other features including passive DNS (pDNS) and domain-based lexical features.