Hands-On Machine Learning for Cybersecurity

Segregating Legitimate and Lousy URLs

A recent study showed that 47% of the world's population is online right now. With the World Wide Web (WWW) at our disposal, we find ourselves fiddling with the various internet sites on offer. However, this exposes us to the most dangerous threat of all, because we are not able distinguish between a legitimate URL and a malicious URL.

In this chapter, we will use a machine learning approach to easily tell the difference between benign and malicious URLs. This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Understanding URLs and how they fit in the internet address scheme
• Introducing malicious URLs
• Looking at the different ways malicious URLs propagate
• Using heuristics to detect malicious URLs
• Using machine ...