Title
Searching the searchers with searchaudit
Abstract
Search engines not only assist normal users, but also provide information that hackers and other malicious entities can exploit in their nefarious activities. With carefully crafted search queries, attackers can gather information such as email addresses and misconfigured or even vulnerable servers. We present SearchAudit, a framework that identifies malicious queries from massive search engine logs in order to uncover their relationship with potential attacks. SearchAudit takes in a small set of malicious queries as seed, expands the set using search logs, and generates regular expressions for detecting new malicious queries. For instance, we show that, relying on just 500 malicious queries as seed, SearchAudit discovers an additional 4 million distinct malicious queries and thousands of vulnerable Web sites. In addition, SearchAudit reveals a series of phishing attacks from more than 400 phishing domains that compromised a large number of Windows Live Messenger user credentials. Thus, we believe that SearchAudit can serve as a useful tool for identifying and preventing a wide class of attacks in their early phases.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2010
USENIX Security Symposium
search log,malicious entity,massive search engine log,million distinct malicious query,new malicious query,phishing attack,search query,phishing domain,search engine,malicious query,regular expression,network security
Field
DocType
Citations 
World Wide Web,Regular expression,Internet privacy,Search engine,Phishing,Computer security,Computer science,Server,Exploit,Hacker
Conference
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.74
16
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
John P. John150028.15
Fang Yu273342.23
Yinglian Xie3114076.73
Martín Abadi4120741324.31
Arvind Krishnamurthy54540312.24