URLCam: Toolkit for malicious URL analysis and modeling

Abstract

The World-Wide Web technology has become an indispensable part in human’s life for almost all activities. On the other hand, the trend of cyberattacks is on the rise in today’s modern Web-driven world. Therefore, effective countermeasures for the analysis and detection of malicious websites is crucial to combat the rising threats to the cyber world security. In this paper, we systematically reviewed the state-of-the-art techniques and identified a total of about 230 features of malicious websites, which are classified as internal and external features. Moreover, we developed a toolkit for the analysis and modeling of malicious websites. The toolkit has implemented several types of feature extraction methods and machine learning algorithms, which can be used to analyze and compare different approaches to detect malicious URLs. Moreover, the toolkit incorporates several other options such as feature selection and imbalanced learning with flexibility to be extended to include more functionality and generalization capabilities. Moreover, some use cases are demonstrated for different datasets.