Biblio

In the prevailing situation, the sports like economic, industrial, cultural, social, and governmental activities are carried out in the online world. Today's international is particularly dependent on the wireless era and protective these statistics from cyber-assaults is a hard hassle. The reason for cyber-assaults is to damage thieve the credentials. In a few other cases, cyber-attacks ought to have a navy or political functions. The damages are PC viruses, facts break, DDS, and exceptional attack vectors. To this surrender, various companies use diverse answers to prevent harm because of cyberattacks. Cyber safety follows actual-time data at the modern-day-day IT data. So, far, numerous techniques have proposed with the resource of researchers around the area to prevent cyber-attacks or lessen the harm due to them. The cause of this has a look at is to survey and comprehensively evaluate the usual advances supplied around cyber safety and to analyse the traumatic situations, weaknesses, and strengths of the proposed techniques. Different sorts of attacks are taken into consideration in element. In addition, evaluation of various cyber-attacks had been finished through the platform called Kali Linux. It is predicted that the complete assessment has a have a study furnished for college students, teachers, IT, and cyber safety researchers might be beneficial.

For a long time, online attacks were regarded to pose a severe threat to web - based applications, websites, and clients. It can bypass authentication methods, steal sensitive information from datasets and clients, and also gain ultimate authority of servers. A variety of ways for safeguarding online apps have been developed and used to deal the website risks. Based on the studies about the intersection of cybersecurity and machine learning, countermeasures for identifying typical web assaults have recently been presented (ML). In order to establish a better understanding on this essential topic, it is necessary to study ML methodologies, feature extraction techniques, evaluate datasets, and performance metrics utilised in a systematic manner. In this paper, we go through web security flaws like SQLi, XSS, malicious URLs, phishing attacks, path traversal, and CMDi in detail. We also go through the existing security methods for detecting these threats using machine learning approaches for URL classification. Finally, we discuss potential research opportunities for ML and DL-based techniques in this category, based on a thorough examination of existing solutions in the literature.

Structured Query Language Injection (SQLi) is a client-side application vulnerability that allows attackers to inject malicious SQL queries with harmful intents, including stealing sensitive information, bypassing authentication, and even executing illegal operations to cause more catastrophic damage to users on the web application. According to OWASP, the top 10 harmful attacks against web applications are SQL Injection attacks. Moreover, based on data reports from the UK's National Fraud Authority, SQL Injection is responsible for 97% of data exposures. Therefore, in order to prevent the SQL Injection attack, detection SQLi system is essential. The contribution of this research is securing web applications by developing a browser extension for Google Chrome using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), which is a unique kind of RNN algorithm capable of learning long-term dependencies like SQL Injection attacks. The results of the model will be deployed in static analysis in a browser extension, and the LSTM algorithm will learn to identify the URL that has to be injected into Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) as a sample-tested web application. Experimental results show that the proposed SQLi detection model based on the LSTM algorithm achieves an accuracy rate of 99.97%, which means that a reliable client-side can effectively detect whether the URL being accessed contains a SQLi attack or not.

Global cybersecurity threats have grown as a result of the evolving digital transformation. Cybercriminals have more opportunities as a result of digitization. Initially, cyberthreats take the form of phishing in order to gain confidential user credentials.As cyber-attacks get more sophisticated and sophisticated, the cybersecurity industry is faced with the problem of utilising cutting-edge technology and techniques to combat the ever-present hostile threats. Hackers use phishing to persuade customers to grant them access to a company’s digital assets and networks. As technology progressed, phishing attempts became more sophisticated, necessitating the development of tools to detect phishing.Machine learning is unsupervised one of the most powerful weapons in the fight against terrorist threats. The features used for phishing detection, as well as the approaches employed with machine learning, are discussed in this study.In this light, the study’s major goal is to propose a unique, robust ensemble machine learning model architecture that gives the highest prediction accuracy with the lowest error rate, while also recommending a few alternative robust machine learning models.Finally, the Random forest algorithm attained a maximum accuracy of 96.454 percent. But by implementing a hybrid model including the 3 classifiers- Decision Trees,Random forest, Gradient boosting classifiers, the accuracy increases to 98.4 percent.

Phishing activity is undertaken by the hackers to compromise the computer networks and financial system. A compromised computer system or network provides data and or processing resources to the world of cybercrime. Cybercrimes are projected to cost the world \$6 trillion by 2021, in this context phishing is expected to continue being a growing challenge. Statistics around phishing growth over the last decade support this theory as phishing numbers enjoy almost an exponential growth over the period. Recent reports on the complexity of the phishing show that the fight against phishing URL as a means of building more resilient cyberspace is an evolving challenge. Compounding the problem is the lack of cyber security expertise to handle the expected rise in incidents. Previous research have proposed different methods including neural network, data mining technique, heuristic-based phishing detection technique, machine learning to detect phishing websites. However, recently phishers have started to use more sophisticated techniques to attack the internet users such as VoIP phishing, spear phishing etc. For these modern methods, the traditional ways of phishing detection provide low accuracy. Hence, the requirement arises for the application and development of modern tools and techniques to use as a countermeasure against such phishing attacks. Keeping in view the nature of recent phishing attacks, it is imperative to develop a state-of-the art anti-phishing tool which should be able to predict the phishing attacks before the occurrence of actual phishing incidents. We have designed such a tool that will work efficiently to detect the phishing websites so that a user can understand easily the risk of using of his personal and financial data.

The main objective of this research is to increase security awareness against phishing attacks in the education sector by teaching users about phishing URLs. The educational media was made based on references from several previous studies that were used as basic references. Development of antiphishing game framework educational media using the extended DPE framework. Participants in this study were vocational and college students in the technology field. The respondents included vocational and college students, each with as many as 30 respondents. To assess the level of awareness and understanding of phishing, especially phishing URLs, participants will be given a pre-test before playing the game, and after completing the game, the application will be given a posttest. A paired t-test was used to answer the research hypothesis. The results of data analysis show differences in the results of increasing identification of URL phishing by respondents before and after using educational media of the anti-phishing game framework in increasing security awareness against URL phishing attacks. More serious game development can be carried out in the future to increase user awareness, particularly in phishing or other security issues, and can be implemented for general users who do not have a background in technology.

The attacker’s server plays an important role in sending attack orders and receiving stolen information, particularly in the more recent cyberattacks. Under these circumstances, it is important to use network-based signatures to block malicious communications in order to reduce the damage. However, in addition to blocking malicious communications, signatures are also required not to block benign communications during normal business operations. Therefore, the generation of signatures requires a high level of understanding of the business, and highly depends on individual skills. In addition, in actual operation, it is necessary to test whether the generated signatures do not interfere with benign communications, which results in high operational costs. In this paper, we propose SIGMA, a system that automatically generates signatures to block malicious communication without interfering with benign communication and then automatically evaluates the impact of the signatures. SIGMA automatically extracts the common parts of malware communication destinations by clustering them and generates multiple candidate signatures. After that, SIGMA automatically calculates the impact on normal communication based on business logs, etc., and presents the final signature to the analyst, which has the highest blockability of malicious communication and non-blockability of normal communication. Our objectives with this system are to reduce the human factor in generating the signatures, reduce the cost of the impact evaluation, and support the decision of whether to apply the signatures. In the preliminary evaluation, we showed that SIGMA can automatically generate a set of signatures that detect 100% of suspicious URLs with an over-detection rate of just 0.87%, using the results of 14,238 malware analyses and actual business logs. This result suggests that the cost for generation of signatures and the evaluation of their impact on business operations can be suppressed, which used to be a time-consuming and human-intensive process.

Due to the rise of the internet a business model known as online advertising has seen unprecedented success. However, it has also become a prime method through which criminals can scam people. Often times even legitimate websites contain advertisements that are linked to scam websites since they are not verified by the website’s owners. Scammers have become quite creative with their attacks, using various unorthodox and inconspicuous methods such as I-frames, Favicons, Proxy servers, Domains, etc. Many modern Anti-viruses are paid services and hence not a feasible option for most users in 3rd world countries. Often people don’t possess devices that have enough RAM to even run such software efficiently leaving them without any options. This project aims to create a Browser extension that will be able to distinguish between safe and unsafe websites by utilizing Machine Learning algorithms. This system is lightweight and free thus fulfilling the needs of most people looking for a cheap and reliable security solution and allowing people to surf the internet easily and safely. The system will scan all the intermittent URL clicks as well, not just the main website thus providing an even greater degree of security.

The persistent growth in phishing and the rising volume of phishing websites has led to individuals and organizations worldwide becoming increasingly exposed to various cyber-attacks. Consequently, more effective phishing detection is required for improved cyber defence. Hence, in this paper we present a deep learning-based approach to enable high accuracy detection of phishing sites. The proposed approach utilizes convolutional neural networks (CNN) for high accuracy classification to distinguish genuine sites from phishing sites. We evaluate the models using a dataset obtained from 6,157 genuine and 4,898 phishing websites. Based on the results of extensive experiments, our CNN based models proved to be highly effective in detecting unknown phishing sites. Furthermore, the CNN based approach performed better than traditional machine learning classifiers evaluated on the same dataset, reaching 98.2% phishing detection rate with an F1-score of 0.976. The method presented in this paper compares favourably to the state-of-the art in deep learning based phishing website detection.

Users prefer to do e-banking and e-shopping now-a-days because of the exponential growth of the internet. Because of this paradigm shift, hackers are finding umpteen ways to steal our personal information and critical details like details of debit and credit cards, by disguising themselves as reputed websites, just by changing the spelling or making minor modifications to the URL. Identifying whether an URL is benign or malicious is a challenging job, because it makes use of the weakness of the user. While there are several works carried out to detect phishing websites, they only use heuristic methods and list based techniques and therefore couldn't avoid phishing effectively. In this paper an anti-phishing system was proposed to protect the users. It uses an ensemble model that uses both LSTM and CNN with a massive data set containing nearly 2,00,000 URLs, that is balanced. After analyzing the accuracy of different existing approaches, it has been found that the ensemble model that uses both LSTM and CNN performed better with an accuracy of 96% and the precision is 97% respectively which is far better than the existing solutions.

Email based Uniform Resource Locator (URL) distribution is one of the popular ways for starting phishing attacks. Conventional anti-phishing solutions rely on security facilities and investigate all incoming emails. This makes the security facilities get overloaded and cause consequences of upgrades or new deployments even with no better options. This paper presents a novel detour strategy for the traffic of visiting potential phishing URLs based on dynamic Domain Name System (DNS) Response Policy Zone (RPZ) in order to mitigate the overloads on security facilities. In the strategy, the URLs included in the incoming emails will be extracted and the corresponding Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) will be registered in the RPZ of the local DNS cache server with mapping the IP address of a special Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) proxy. The contribution of the approach is to avoid heavy investigations on all incoming emails and mitigate the overloads on security facilities by directing the traffic to phishing URLs to the special HTTP proxy connected with a set of security facilities conducting various inspections. The evaluation results on the prototype system showed that the URL extraction and FQDN registration were finished before the emails had been delivered and accesses to the URLs were successfully directed to the special HTTP proxy. The results of overhead measurements also confirmed that the proposed strategy only affected the internal email server with 11% of performance decrease on the prototype system.

Phishing is an act of creating a website similar to a legitimate website with a motive of stealing user's confidential information. Phishing fraud might be the most popular cybercrime. Phishing is one of the risks that originated a couple of years back but still prevailing. This paper discusses various phishing attacks, some of the latest phishing evasion techniques used by attackers and anti-phishing approaches. This review raises awareness of those phishing strategies and helps the user to practice phishing prevention. Here, a hybrid approach of phishing detection also described having fast response time and high accuracy.

Phishing URL is a type of cyberattack, based on falsified URLs. The number of phishing URL attacks continues to increase despite cybersecurity efforts. According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), the number of phishing websites observed in 2020 is 1 520 832, doubling over the course of a year. Various algorithms, techniques and methods can be used to build models for phishing URL detection and classification. From our reading, we observed that Machine Learning (ML) is one of the recent approaches used to detect and classify phishing URL in an efficient and proactive way. In this paper, we evaluate eleven of the most adopted ML algorithms such as Decision Tree (DT), Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Gradient Boosting (GB), Logistic Regression (LR), Naïve Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Neural Network (NN), Ex-tra\_Tree (ET), Ada\_Boost (AB) and Bagging (B). To do that, we compute detection accuracy metric for each algorithm and we use lexical analysis to extract the URL features.

Phishing is a type of fraud on the Internet in the form of fake web pages that mimic the original web pages to trick users into sending sensitive information to phisher. The statistics presented by APWG and Phistank show that the number of phishing websites from 2015 to 2020 tends to increase continuously. To overcome this problem, several studies have been carried out including detecting phishing web pages using various features of web pages with various methods. Unfortunately, the use of several methods is not really effective because the design and evaluation are only too focused on the achievement of detection accuracy in research, but evaluation does not represent application in the real world. Whereas a security detection device should require effectiveness, good performance, and deployable. In this study the authors evaluated several methods and proposed rules-based applications that can detect phishing more efficiently.

A successful phishing attack is prelude to various other severe attacks such as login credentials theft, unauthorized access to user’s confidential data, malware and ransomware infestation of victim’s machine etc. This paper proposes a real time lightweight machine learning based security framework for detection of phishing attacks through analysis of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). The proposed framework initially extracts a set of highly discriminating and uncorrelated features from the URL string corpus. These extracted features are then used to transform the URL strings into their corresponding numeric feature vectors, which are eventually used to train various machine learning based classifier models for identification of malicious phishing URLs. Performance analysis of the proposed security framework on two well known datasets: Kaggle dataset and UNB dataset shows that it is capable of detecting malicious phishing URLs with high precision, while at the same time maintain a very low level of false positive rate. The proposed framework is also shown to outperform other similar security frameworks proposed in the literature.121https://www.kaggle.com/antonyj453/ur1dataset2https://www.unb.ca/cic/datasets/ur1-2016.htm1

Content blocking is an important part of a per-formant, user-serving, privacy respecting web. Current content blockers work by building trust labels over URLs. While useful, this approach has many well understood shortcomings. Attackers may avoid detection by changing URLs or domains, bundling unwanted code with benign code, or inlining code in pages.The common flaw in existing approaches is that they evaluate code based on its delivery mechanism, not its behavior. In this work we address this problem by building a system for generating signatures of the privacy-and-security relevant behavior of executed JavaScript. Our system uses as the unit of analysis each script's behavior during each turn on the JavaScript event loop. Focusing on event loop turns allows us to build highly identifying signatures for JavaScript code that are robust against code obfuscation, code bundling, URL modification, and other common evasions, as well as handle unique aspects of web applications.This work makes the following contributions to the problem of measuring and improving content blocking on the web: First, we design and implement a novel system to build per-event-loop-turn signatures of JavaScript behavior through deep instrumentation of the Blink and V8 runtimes. Second, we apply these signatures to measure how much privacy-and-security harming code is missed by current content blockers, by using EasyList and EasyPrivacy as ground truth and finding scripts that have the same privacy and security harming patterns. We build 1,995,444 signatures of privacy-and-security relevant behaviors from 11,212 unique scripts blocked by filter lists, and find 3,589 unique scripts hosting known harmful code, but missed by filter lists, affecting 12.48% of websites measured. Third, we provide a taxonomy of ways scripts avoid detection and quantify the occurrence of each. Finally, we present defenses against these evasions, in the form of filter list additions where possible, and through a proposed, signature based system in other cases.As part of this work, we share the implementation of our signature-generation system, the data gathered by applying that system to the Alexa 100K, and 586 AdBlock Plus compatible filter list rules to block instances of currently blocked code being moved to new URLs.

The accessibility of the internet and mobile platforms has risen dramatically due to digital technology innovations. Web applications have opened up a variety of market possibilities by supplying consumers with a wide variety of digital technologies that benefit from high accessibility and functionality. Around the same time, web application protection continues to be an important challenge on the internet, and security must be taken seriously in order to secure confidential data. The threat is caused by inadequate validation of user input information, software developed without strict adherence to safety standards, vulnerability of reusable software libraries, software weakness, and so on. Through abusing a website's vulnerability, introduers are manipulating the user's information in order to exploit it for their own benefit. Then introduers inject their own malicious code, stealing passwords, manipulating user activities, and infringing on customers' privacy. As a result, information is leaked, applications malfunction, confidential data is accessed, etc. To mitigate the aforementioned issues, stacking ensemble based classifier model for Cross-site scripting (XSS) attack detection is proposed. Furthermore, the stacking ensembles technique is used in combination with different machine learning classification algorithms like k-Means, Random Forest and Decision Tree as base-learners to reliably detect XSS attack. Logistic Regression is used as meta-learner to predict the attack with greater accuracy. The classification algorithms in stacking model explore the problem in their own way and its results are given as input to the meta-learner to make final prediction, thus improving the overall detection accuracy of XSS attack in stacking than the individual models. The simulation findings demonstrate that the proposed model detects XSS attack successfully.

In this information age, web crawling on the internet is a prime source for data collection. And with the surface web already being dominated by giants like Google and Microsoft, much attention has been on the Dark Web. While research on crawling approaches is generally available, a considerable gap is present for URL extraction on the dark web. With most literature using the regular expressions methodology or built-in parsers, the problem with these methods is the higher number of false positives generated with the Dark Web, which makes the crawler less efficient. This paper proposes the dedicated parsers methodology for extracting URLs from the dark web, which when compared proves to be better than the regular expression methodology. Factors that make link harvesting on the Dark Web a challenge are discussed in the paper.

Phishing URLs mainly target individuals and/or organizations through social engineering attacks by exploiting the humans' weaknesses in information security awareness. These URLs lure online users to access fake websites, and harvest their confidential information, such as debit/credit card numbers and other sensitive information. In this work, we introduce a phishing detection technique based on URL lexical analysis and machine learning classifiers. The experiments were carried out on a dataset that originally contained 1056937 labeled URLs (phishing and legitimate). This dataset was processed to generate 22 different features that were reduced further to a smaller set using different features reduction techniques. Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Neural Network and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers were all evaluated, and results show the superiority of SVMs, which achieved the highest accuracy in detecting the analyzed URLs with a rate of 99.89%. Our approach can be incorporated within add-on/middleware features in Internet browsers for alerting online users whenever they try to access a phishing website using only its URL.

The digital transformation is injecting energy into economic growth and governance improvement for the China government. Digital governance and e-government services are playing a more and more important role in public management and social governance. Meanwhile, cyber-attacks and threats become the major challenges for e-government application systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel dynamic access entry scheme for web application, which provide a rapidly-changing defender-controlled attack surface based on Moving Target Defense (MTD) technology. The scheme can turn the static keywords of Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into the dynamic and random ones, which significantly increase the cost to adversaries attack. We present the prototype of the proposed scheme and evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness. The experimental results demonstrated the scheme is practical and effective.

Nowadays most of our data is stored on an electronic device. The risk of that device getting infected by Viruses, Malware, Worms, Trojan, Ransomware, or any unwanted invader has increased a lot these days. This is mainly because of easy access to the internet. Viruses and malware have evolved over time so identification of these files has become difficult. Not only by viruses and malware your device can be attacked by a click on forged URLs. Our proposed solution for this problem uses machine learning techniques and signature matching techniques. The main aim of our solution is to identify the malicious programs/URLs and act upon them. The core idea in identifying the malware is selecting the key features from the Portable Executable file headers using these features we trained a random forest model. This RF model will be used for scanning a file and determining if that file is malicious or not. For identification of the virus, we are using the signature matching technique which is used to match the MD5 hash of the file with the virus signature database containing the MD5 hash of the identified viruses and their families. To distinguish between benign and illegitimate URLs there is a logistic regression model used. The regression model uses a tokenizer for feature extraction from the URL that is to be classified. The tokenizer separates all the domains, sub-domains and separates the URLs on every `/'. Then a TfidfVectorizer (Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) is used to convert the text into a weighted value. These values are used to predict if the URL is safe to visit or not. On the integration of all three modules, the final application will provide full system protection against malicious software.

Internet security is constantly at risk as a result of the fast developing and highly sophisticated exploitation methods. These attacks use numerous media to take advantage of the most vulnerable of Internet users. Phishing, spam calling, unsecure content and other means of intrusion threaten Internet users every day. In order to maintain the security and privacy of sensitive user data, the user must pay for services that include the storage and generation of secure passwords, monitoring internet traffic to discourage navigation to malicious websites, among other services. Some people do not have the money to purchase privacy protection services and others find convoluted euphemisms baked into privacy policies quite confusing. In response to this problem, we developed an Internet security software package, Secure Suite, which we provide as open source and hence free of charge. Users can easily deploy and manage Secure Suite. It is composed of a password manager, a malicious URL detection service, dubbed MalURLNet, a URL extender, data visualization tools, a browser extension to interact with the web app, and utility tools to maintain data integrity. MalURLNet is one of the main components of Secure Suite. It utilizes deep learning and other open-source software to mitigate security threats by identifying malicious URLs. We exhaustively tested our proposed MalURLNet service. Our studies show that MalURLNet outperforms four other well-known URL classifiers in terms of accuracy, loss, precision, recall, and F1-Score.

Recently, phishing attacks have taking a new dimension with the addition of quick response code to phishing attacks vectors. Quick response code phishing attack is when an attacker lures its victims to voluntarily divulge personal information such as password, personal identification number, username and other information such as online banking details through the use of quick response code. This attack is on the rise as more and more people have adopted mobile phone usage not just for communication only but to perform transaction seamlessly. The ease of creation and use of quick response code has made it easily acceptable to both provider of goods and services and consumers. This attack is semantic as it exploits human vulnerabilities; as users can hardly know what is hidden in the quick response code before usage. This study reviewed various methodologies that earlier researcher have used to detect this semantic-based attack of phishing. The strength of each methodology, its weakness and general research gaps identified.

Spring security is tremendously popular among practitioners for its ease of use to secure enterprise applications. In this paper, we study the application framework misconfiguration vulnerabilities in the light of Spring security, which is relatively understudied in the existing literature. Towards that goal, we identify 6 types of security anti-patterns and 4 insecure vulnerable defaults by conducting a measurement-based approach on 28 Spring applications. Our analysis shows that security risks associated with the identified security anti-patterns and insecure defaults can leave the enterprise application vulnerable to a wide range of high-risk attacks. To prevent these high-risk attacks, we also provide recommendations for practitioners. Consequently, our study has contributed one update to the official Spring security documentation while other security issues identified in this study are being considered for future major releases by Spring security community.

Phishing sends malicious links or attachments through emails that can perform various functions, including capturing the victim's login credentials or account information. These emails harm the victims, cause money loss, and identity theft. In this paper, we contribute to solving the phishing problem by developing an extension for the Google Chrome web browser. In the development of this feature, we used JavaScript PL. To be able to identify and prevent the fishing attack, a combination of Blacklisting and semantic analysis methods was used. Furthermore, a database for phishing sites is generated, and the text, links, images, and other data on-site are analyzed for pattern recognition. Finally, our proposed solution was tested and compared to existing approaches. The results validate that our proposed method is capable of handling the phishing issue substantially.