Msc. Candidate: Muhsin Aldemir

Program: Information Systems

Date: 02.09.2019 15:30 p.m

Place: A-108

Abstract: Malicious websites pose major risks to users and businesses including economic damages, privacy breaches and loss of valuable data. Malicious actors use websites as a spreading medium for their motives. Analyzing the relationships between malicious websites and comparing them to benign ones can help understand the problem better, and enable detection and prevention of these websites more accurately. This thesis focuses on detection and characterization of malicious websites using Social Network Analysis (SNA). SNA provides powerful methodologies for discovering and visualizing the relationships between actors. By utilizing the links in between and among malicious and benign websites, graphs were constituted, whose nodes were websites and ties were hyperlinks between them. For this purpose, the data which included the snapshot of the pairwise links amongst millions of websites, the list of malicious websites and their types were obtained from the web. First, the same size networks of malicious and benign websites were characterised and compared using their descriptive properties. Then, using these networks new analyses were carried out to determine malicious websites and their types based on their network structures and link similarities. Results were presented showing the detection accuracies of applied methods.