Graphing Website Relationships for Risk Prediction: Identifying Derived Threats to Users Based on Known Indicators

Abstract

The hypothesis for the study was that the relationship based on referrer links and the number of hops to a malicious site could indicate the risk to another website. The researchers chose Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis as the method of comparing true-positive and false-positive rates for captured web traffic to test the predictive capabilities of the created model. Known threat indicators were used as designators and leveraged with the Neo4j graph database to map the relationships between other websites based on referring links. Using the referring traffic, the researchers mapped user visits across websites with a known relationship to track the rate at which users progressed from a non-malicious website to a known threat. The results were grouped by the hop distance from the known threat to calculate the predictive rate. The results of the model produced true-positive rates between 58.59% and 63.45% and false-positive rates between 7.42% and 37.50%, respectively. The true and false-positive rates suggest an improved performance based on the closer proximity from the known threat, while an increased referring distance from the threat resulted in higher rates of false-positives.

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