Malicious URL detection by dynamically mining patterns without pre-defined elements

Detecting malicious URLs is an essential task in network security intelligence. In this paper, we make two new contributions beyond the state-of-the-art methods on malicious URL detection. First, instead of using any pre-defined features or fixed delimiters for feature selection, we propose to dynamically extract lexical patterns from URLs. Our novel model of URL patterns provides new flexibility and capability on capturing malicious URLs algorithmically generated by malicious programs. Second, we develop a new method to mine our novel URL patterns, which are not assembled using any pre-defined items and thus cannot be mined using any existing frequent pattern mining methods. Our extensive empirical study using the real data sets from Fortinet, a leader in the network security industry, clearly shows the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.