Knowledge-Based Approach to Detect Potentially Risky Websites

Abstract

Nowadays, fraudulent and malicious websites are emerging as a harmful and very common problem on the Internet. It causes huge money losses and irreparable damage for both companies and particulars. To face this situation, governments have approved multiple law projects. This way, the legality on the Internet is being enforced and sanctions to those offenders who develop illegal or malicious activities are being imposed. However, governments still need a way to simplify the classification of websites into risky or non-risky, since most of this work is manual. This paper presents the DOmains Classifier based on RIsky Websites (DOCRIW) framework to detect domains that contain possible fraud or malicious content. It is based on two main components. The first component is a previously built knowledge base containing information from risky websites. The second one complements the system with a binary classifier able to label a website (as risky or not) considering just its domain. The system makes use of web information sources and includes host-based variables. It also applies similarity measures, supervised learning algorithms and optimization methods to enhance its performance. The presented work is experimental, rendering promising outcomes.

Keywords

• Risky website detection
• malware alerts
• knowledge-based systems
• similarity metrics
• combination of information