The Spatial Analysis of the Malicious Uniform Resource Locators (URLs): 2016 Dataset Case Study

In this study, we aimed to identify spatial clusters of countries with high rates of cyber attacks directed at other countries. The cyber attack dataset was obtained from Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity, with over 110,000 Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), which were classified into one of 5 cat...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Information (Basel) 2021-01, Vol.12 (1), p.2
Main Authors: Amin, Raid W., Sevil, Hakki Erhan, Kocak, Salih, Francia, Guillermo, Hoover, Philip
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Annual reports
Classification
Clusters
cyber attack
Cybercrime
Cybersecurity
Datasets
Internet Protocol
Malware
Open source software
Phishing
Population
Risk assessment
Spacetime
spam
Spatial analysis
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)
URLs
Websites
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In this study, we aimed to identify spatial clusters of countries with high rates of cyber attacks directed at other countries. The cyber attack dataset was obtained from Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity, with over 110,000 Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), which were classified into one of 5 categories: benign, phishing, malware, spam, or defacement. The disease surveillance software SaTScanTM was used to perform a spatial analysis of the country of origin for each cyber attack. It allowed the identification of spatial and space-time clusters of locations with unusually high counts or rates of cyber attacks. Number of internet users per country obtained from the 2016 CIA World Factbook was used as the population baseline for computing rates and Poisson analysis in SaTScanTM. The clusters were tested for significance with a Monte Carlo study within SaTScanTM, where any cluster with p < 0.05 was designated as a significant cyber attack cluster. Results using the rate of the different types of malicious URL cyber attacks are presented in this paper. This novel approach of studying cyber attacks from a spatial perspective provides an invaluable relative risk assessment for each type of cyber attack that originated from a particular country.
ISSN:2078-2489
2078-2489
DOI:10.3390/info12010002