Web applications have become ubiquitous for many business sectors due to their platform independence and low operation cost. Billions of users are visiting these applications to accomplish their daily tasks. However, many of these applications are either vulnerable to web defacement attacks or created and managed by hackers such as fraudulent and phishing websites. Detecting malicious websites is essential to prevent the spreading of malware and protect end-users from being victims. However, most existing solutions rely on extracting features from the website’s content which can be harmful to the detection machines themselves and subject to obfuscations. Detecting malicious Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) is safer and more efficient than content analysis. However, the detection of malicious URLs is still not well addressed due to insufficient features and inaccurate classification. This study aims at improving the detection accuracy of malicious URL detection by designing and developing a cyber threat intelligence-based malicious URL detection model using two-stage ensemble learning. The cyber threat intelligence-based features are extracted from web searches to improve detection accuracy. Cybersecurity analysts and users reports around the globe can provide important information regarding malicious websites. Therefore, cyber threat intelligence-based (CTI) features extracted from Google searches and Whois websites are used to improve detection performance. The study also proposed a two-stage ensemble learning model that combines the random forest (RF) algorithm for preclassification with multilayer perceptron (MLP) for final decision making. The trained MLP classifier has replaced the majority voting scheme of the three trained random forest classifiers for decision making. The probabilistic output of the weak classifiers of the random forest was aggregated and used as input for the MLP classifier for adequate classification. Results show that the extracted CTI-based features with the two-stage classification outperform other studies’ detection models. The proposed CTI-based detection model achieved a 7.8% accuracy improvement and 6.7% reduction in false-positive rates compared with the traditional URL-based model.

/pdf/cyber-threat-intelligence-based-malicious-url-detection-sjc9pyxp.pdf

Cyber Threat Intelligence-Based Malicious URL Detection Model Using Ensemble Learning

Business failure prediction is very important for the sustainable development of enterprises. Machine learning algorithms, especially ensemble algorithms, have shown great economic benefits in enterprise financial early warning. However, the highly imbalanced class distribution of financial risk data and the inexplainable of most machine learning-based early distress warning models limit their commercial application. To address the above limitations, we enhance the business failure prediction performance by tree-ensemble in a boosting manner. Moreover, to solve the class imbalanced issue in business failure datasets, a weighted objective function, weighted cross-entropy, is embedded into the boosted tree framework, making the weighted XGBoost a cost-sensitive business failure prediction model. Besides, to tackle the second issue, we explore the intrinsic interpretability of the proposed method by visualizing the feature importance and incorporating a partial dependence plot technique to locally interpret the individual business failure event. Experimental results on business failure datasets with different predictive horizons collected from China Security Market Accounting Research (CSMAR) database show the proposed weighted XGBoost is a good solution to reduce the error on recognizing firms in business failure. Furthermore, the visualized feature importance score and partial dependence plot result both demonstrate that the cost-sensitive tree-based ensemble can be a good tool to guide the investors in making rational as well as provide interpretable business prediction results as a reference for the policy-making of the regulators. 

/pdf/business-failure-prediction-based-on-a-cost-sensitive-2leoz2kr.pdf

Business Failure Prediction Based on a Cost-Sensitive Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine

Business failure prediction is very important for the sustainable development of enterprises. Machine learning algorithms, especially ensemble algorithms, have shown great economic benefits in enterprise financial early warning. However, the highly imbalanced class distribution of financial risk data and the inexplainable of most machine learning-based early distress warning models limit their commercial application. To address the above limitations, we enhance the business failure prediction performance by tree-ensemble in a boosting manner. Moreover, to solve the class imbalanced issue in business failure datasets, a weighted objective function, weighted cross-entropy, is embedded into the boosted tree framework, making the weighted XGBoost a cost-sensitive business failure prediction model. Besides, to tackle the second issue, we explore the intrinsic interpretability of the proposed method by visualizing the feature importance and incorporating a partial dependence plot technique to locally interpret the individual business failure event. Experimental results on business failure datasets with different predictive horizons collected from China Security Market Accounting Research (CSMAR) database show the proposed weighted XGBoost is a good solution to reduce the error on recognizing firms in business failure. Furthermore, the visualized feature importance score and partial dependence plot result both demonstrate that the cost-sensitive tree-based ensemble can be a good tool to guide the investors in making rational as well as provide interpretable business prediction results as a reference for the policy-making of the regulators.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx7/6287639/6514899/09760439.pdf

Web phishing is a form of cybercrime aimed at tricking people into visiting malicious URLs to exfiltrate sensitive data. Since the structure of a malicious URL evolves over time, phishing detection mechanisms that can adapt to such variations are paramount. Furthermore, web phishing detection is an unbalanced classification task, as legitimate URLs outnumber malicious ones in real-life cases. Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a promising technique to minimize concept drift to enhance web phishing detection. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) combines DL with reinforcement learning (RL); that is, a sequential decision-making paradigm in which the problem to be addressed is expressed as a Markov decision process (MDP). Recent studies have proposed an ad hoc MDP formulation to tackle unbalanced classification tasks called the imbalanced classification Markov decision process (ICMDP). In this paper, we exploit the ICMDP to present a double deep Q-Network (DDQN)-based classifier to address the unbalanced web phishing classification problem. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a Mendeley web phishing dataset, from which three different data imbalance scenarios are generated. Despite a significant training time, it results in better geometric mean, index of balanced accuracy, F1 score, and area under the ROC curve than other DL-based classifiers combined with data-level sampling techniques in all test cases.

Unbalanced Web Phishing Classification through Deep Reinforcement Learning

In today’s digital landscape, the increasing prevalence of internet-connected devices, including smartphones, personal computers, and IoT devices, has enabled users to perform a wide range of daily activities such as shopping, banking, and communication in the online world. However, cybercriminals are capitalizing on the Internet’s anonymity and the ease of conducting cyberattacks. Phishing attacks have become a popular method for acquiring sensitive user information, including passwords, bank account details, social security numbers and more, often through social engineering and messaging tools. To protect users from such threats, it is essential to establish sophisticated phishing detection systems on computing devices. Many of these systems leverage machine learning techniques for accurate classification. In recent years, deep learning algorithms have gained prominence, especially when dealing with large datasets. This study presents the development of a phishing detection system based on deep learning, employing five different algorithms: artificial neural networks, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, bidirectional recurrent neural networks, and attention networks. The system primarily focuses on the fast classification of web pages using URLs. To assess the system’s performance, a relatively extensive dataset of labeled URLs, comprising approximately five million records, was collected and shared. The experimental results indicate that convolutional neural networks achieved the highest performance, boasting a detection accuracy of 98.74% for phishing attacks. This research underscores the effectiveness of deep learning algorithms, particularly in enhancing cybersecurity in the face of evolving cyber threats.

DEPHIDES: Deep Learning Based Phishing Detection System

Imbalanced class has been a common problem encountered in the modeling process, and has attracted more and more attention from scholars. Biased classifiers, which limit the classifiers’ performance for minority classes, will be produced if the imbalanced ratio between the number of positive labels and negative labels is ignored. The synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) is a very classic and popular over-sampling method, which is widely used to address this problem. However, SMOTE increases label noise and the training time during the over-sampling process. To improve the detection rate of minority classes while ensuring efficiency, we propose a cost-sensitive XGBoost (CS-XGB) for the imbalanced data problem. The CS-XGB method can reduce the classifiers’ preference for most classes without changing the distribution of the original data. 600000 Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) were collected to validate the CS-XGB method. We compare XGBoost (XGB), SMOTE+XGB and CS-XGB, and the experimental results confirm that the CS-XGB is robust and efficient for imbalanced cases.

/pdf/an-effective-cost-sensitive-xgboost-method-for-malicious-ojv0jiv3oh.pdf

An Effective Cost-Sensitive XGBoost Method for Malicious URLs Detection in Imbalanced Dataset

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An Effective Cost-Sensitive XGBoost Method for Malicious URLs Detection in Imbalanced Dataset