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The Words That Indicate Malicious Domain URLs
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from AT&T have released research which improves the identification-rate of malicious URLs — such as those used for C&C servers or to distribute malware to redirected victims — by individuating words in the domain names. Though many of the words that Wei Wang and Kenneth Shirley were able to group as 'malign' are predictable, there is a strange recurrence of basketball-related words in the URL lexicon of malice, with 'bad' domains using names such as LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. By contrast 'golf' is least likely to be seen in a dangerous URL, along with state names, scenery and realty.
'nuff said.
Seriously, it seems they know how to entice the befuddled masses in to clicking on their garbage.
This kind of research is almost self-defeating.
When you put out there a list of words that help flag a domain as "bad", you're just signaling to the malware makers to avoid those words.
Then you can make a new list of words. And then they'll avoid those words.
Eventually, the malware domains will be essentially indistinguishable from the real domains.
That's lose-lose for everyone.
Unfortunately, keeping the list secret does no good either. If it's truly secret, then no one can use it to fight malware. If it's only "secret" as in "not widely published", then the malware makers will still find it and use it.
There is no right choice.
The paper is interesting, but I doubt it's very effective. An awful lot of the malicious URLs we seen in our filters are legitimate web sites that have been compromised and had malicious content inserted. We have thousands of malicious URLs containing "wp-content", just to give you an idea...
You know, if you weren't waiting to post these stupid comments on Slashdot, you'd have more time to fap.
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Unless that's the thing that gets him/her going.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
sourceforge.net
cnet.com and download.com
softpedia.com
Silence is a state of mime.
What really SHOULD be evil is Gorf! Those Gorfians want to kill us all!
So you only enjoy one of your two penises? That's only half the fun!
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www.goat-simulator.com
Unless you consider motivating people to wasting time to be malicious....
Note: google(url:goat) gives you many more of these insidious "goat" pages, including one that seems to be "non-vet" medical emergency services for goats.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.