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URL Analysis: How to Determine Maliciousness
Tools for cyber professionals. Yes, they are free.
What is URL analysis?
URL analysis is a thorough examination of a web address to determine the risk of malicious intent upon visiting the site. This process includes checking of reputation score and IP information of the web address. URL expander, sandboxing, and proxy check are also used to observe the behaviour of the website upon a visit.
Why do URL analysis?
As a cyber security analyst, I face a flood of information to process everyday. URL analysis comes up as the most frequently used toolkit out of many others in my virtual utility belt as I surf the internet.
Manual URL analysis are hardly called for with automatic filtering done by your applications. The layman may not know this but web servers and browsers constantly filter web traffic to protect their users.
Unfortunately, the best protection is only as strong as its weakest link. And that is usually human. Well, can’t blame ’em if…
- 40% of malicious URLs were found on good domains. Legitimate websites are frequently compromised to host malicious content.
- Phishing attacks increase by 65% as success rate of attacks increase…
