Delta: Automatic Identification of Unknown Web-based Infection Campaigns

Authors

Kevin Borgolte, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna

Venue

Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2013

Abstract

Identifying malicious web sites has become a major challenge in today’s Internet. Previous work focused on detecting if a web site is malicious by dynamically executing JavaScript in instrumented environments or by rendering web sites in client honeypots. Both techniques bear a significant evaluation overhead, since the analysis can take up to tens of seconds or even minutes per sample. In this paper, we introduce a novel, purely static analysis approach, the Delta-system, that (i) extracts change-related features between two versions of the same website, (ii) uses a machine-learning algorithm to derive a model of web site changes, (iii) detects if a change was malicious or benign, (iv) identifies the underlying infection vector campaign based on clustering, and (iv) generates an identifying signature. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the Delta-system by evaluating it on a dataset of over 26 million pairs of web sites by running next to a web crawler for a period of four months. Over this time span, the Delta-system successfully identified previously unknown infection campaigns. Including a campaign that targeted installations of the Discuz!X Internet forum software by injecting infection vectors into these forums and redirecting forum readers to an installation of the Cool Exploit Kit.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Borgolte2013Delta_Automatic,
  title     = {{Delta: Automatic Identification of Unknown Web-based Infection Campaigns}},
  author    = {Borgolte, Kevin and Kruegel, Christopher and Vigna, Giovanni},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security},
  series    = {CCS},
  month     = {November},
  year      = {2013},
  publisher = {ACM}
}