Malicious spyware poses a significant threat to desktop security and integrity. This paper examines that threat from an Internet perspective. Using a crawler, we performed a large-scale, longitudinal study of the Web, sampling both executables and conventional Web pages for malicious objects. Our results show the extent of spyware content. For example, in a May 2005 crawl of 18 million URLs, we...

Crowdturfing has recently been identified as a sinister counterpart to the enormous positive opportunities of crowdsourcing. Crowdturfers leverage human-powered crowdsourcing platforms to spread malicious URLs in social media, form “astroturf” campaigns, and manipulate search engines, ultimately degrading the quality of online information and threatening the usefulness of these systems. In this...

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms that has 313 million monthly active users which post 500 million tweets per day. This popularity attracts the attention of spammers who use Twitter for their malicious aims such as phishing legitimate users or spreading malicious software and advertises through URLs shared within tweets, aggressively follow/unfollow legitimate users and ...

There are currently dozens of freely available tools to combat phishing and other web-based scams, many of which are web browser extensions that warn users when they are browsing a suspected phishing site. We developed an automated test bed for testing antiphishing tools. We used 200 verified phishing URLs from two sources and 516 legitimate URLs to test the effectiveness of 10 popular anti-phi...

DEFINITION Part of the success of the World Wide Web arises from its lack of central control, because it allows every owner of a computer to contribute to a universally shared information space. The size and lack of central control presents a challenge for any global calculations that operate on the web as a distributed database. The scalability issue is typically handled by creating a central ...

The World Wide Web is a dynamic environment that does not guarantee permanent access or content stability. We determined the prevalence of URLs in forthcoming, biomedical papers when they are first released in MEDLINE(R) and prospectively evaluated the rate of inaccessible URLs during a 19-day period. Among 96,153 references from 2,614 forthcoming papers (739 journals) the prevalence of URLs wa...

There are currently dozens of freely available tools to combat phishing and other web-based scams, many of which are web browser extensions that warn users when they are browsing a suspected phishing site. We developed an automated test bed for testing antiphishing tools. We used 200 verified phishing URLs from two sources and 516 legitimate URLs to test the effectiveness of 10 popular anti-phi...

Cyber Physical Social Sensing makes mobile social networks (MSNs) popular with users. However, such attacks are rampant as malicious URLs are spread covertly through quick response (QR) codes to control compromised accounts in MSNs to propagate malicious messages. Currently, there are generally two types of methods to identify compromised accounts in MSNs: one type is to analyze the potential t...

BACKGROUND Over the last decade, Web sites (URLs) have been increasingly cited in scientific articles. However, the contents of the page of interest may change over the time. OBJECTIVE To investigate the trend of citation to URLs in five general medical journals since January 2006 to June 2013 and to compare the trends in mainstream journals with small journals. METHODS References of all or...

Background: Over the last decade, Web sites (URLs) have been increasingly cited in scientific articles. However, the contents of the page of interest may change over the time. Objective: To investigate the trend of citation to URLs in five general medical journals since January 2006 to June 2013 and to compare the trends in mainstream journals with small journals. Methods: References of all ori...