Publication

Abstract : In this paper, we have described the use of distributed representations for malicious domain detection using Random Indexing and Machine Learning. At first, the proposed approach focuses on distributed representations of the context accumulated from domains, subdomains, and the path of each URL in the given set using Random Indexing and then applies the machine learning approaches for the classification to detect malicious and benign domains. In order to measure the classification performance, we have built five machine learning classifiers using Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, and Random Forest. All these machine learning models are used to detect malicious domains from others in a given set of URLs. We have used two datasets: one consisting of malicious domains collected from 360.net Lab and another one consisting of benign domains collected from Alexa’s top 1 million domains. We have compared the performance of the existing malicious detection approach with the proposed Random Indexing and machine learning-based approach on different distributions of the training and test dataset. It has been observed that the proposed approach with the Random Forest classifier identifies malicious URLs with a precision score of 99.5%.