Improved Blacklisting: Inspecting the Structural Neighborhood of Malicious URLs

Abstract

Filtering based on blacklists is a major countermeasure against malicious websites. However, blacklists must be updated because malicious URLs tend to be short-lived, and they can be partially mutated to avoid blacklisting. Due to these characteristics, it can be assumed that unknown malicious URLs exist in the neighborhood of known malicious URLs created by the same adversary. The authors propose an effective blacklist URL generation method that discovers URLs in the neighborhood of a malicious URL by using a search engine. This article is part of a special issue on security.