A drive-by download attack occurs when a user visits a webpage which attempts to automatically download malware without the user’s consent. Attackers sometimes use a malware distribution network (MDN) to manage a large number of malicious webpages, exploits, and malware executables. In this paper, we provide a new method to determine these MDNs from the secondary URLs and redirect chains recorded by a high-interaction client honeypot. In addition, we propose a novel drive-by download detection method. Instead of depending on the malicious content used by previous methods, our algorithm first identifies and then leverages the URLs of the MDN’s central servers, where a central server is a common server shared by a large percentage of the drive-by download attacks in the same MDN. A set of regular expression-based signatures are then generated based on the URLs of each central server. This method allows additional malicious webpages to be identified which launched but failed to execute a successful drive-by download attack. The new drive-by detection system named ARROW has been implemented, and we provide a large-scale evaluation on the output of a production drive-by detection system. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, where the detection coverage has been boosted by 96% with an extremely low false positive rate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A drive-by download attack occurs when a user visits a webpage which attempts to automatically download malware without the user’s consent. Attackers sometimes use a malware distribution network (MDN) to manage a large number of malicious webpages, exploits, and malware executables. In this paper, we provide a new method to determine these MDNs from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13556,13558],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-field-of-study":[246691,248383,253414,253405,253417,248776,253411,253408,248542,250582],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-161424","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-security-privacy-cryptography","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-computer-science","msr-field-of-study-computer-security","msr-field-of-study-download","msr-field-of-study-drive-by-download","msr-field-of-study-executable","msr-field-of-study-exploit","msr-field-of-study-honeypot","msr-field-of-study-malware","msr-field-of-study-server","msr-field-of-study-web-page"],"msr_publishername":"ACM","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2011-3-27","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"206617","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"doi","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"10.1145\/1963405.1963435","label_id":"243106","label":0},{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/zhangArrow.pdf","label_id":"243132","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Junjie Zhang","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Christian Seifert","user_id":39048,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Christian Seifert"},{"type":"edited_text","value":"Jack W. Stokes","user_id":32427,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Jack W. Stokes"},{"type":"text","value":"Wenke Lee","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[],"msr_project":[385757],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/161424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/161424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":733666,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/161424\/revisions\/733666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-content-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-content-type?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-product-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-product-type?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-platform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-platform?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-download-source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-download-source?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=161424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=161424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}