6th European Conference - Academic Conferences

Manoj Cherukuri and Srinivas Mukkamala
This website in Figure 13 is not malicious but has links to other malicious websites on the right column
(marked in box) with the heading as “TRY MORE”. Similarity among the products on the right column
with the product of the main website draws the user’s attention towards them.
5.3 Malicious websites linked to other malicious websites
For this analysis, a graph G (V, E) was constructed, where V is the set of vertices and E is the set of
edges. All the malicious websites that participated in the construction of the link structure were
considered as the vertices of graph G. Based on the links obtained during the construction of the link
structure, the vertices were connected with directional edges. In order to identify the malicious
websites linked to other malicious websites, all the vertices which had links to another vertex were
selected.
Figure 13: Figure shows the screenshot of cddvdcopy.net
In our study of link analysis, it was observed that around 1000 malicious websites were linked directly
to another malicious website. Manual analysis was done on these sites to have a better knowledge
about the linking mechanism. The reason for having such links might be that many malicious domains
are under the control of a single envelope stealer trying to host multiple types of attacks on different
domains. In such a case the envelope stealers would prefer to have links among the malicious
domains under their control. The domains encountered under this category were less compared to the
previous category. The main reason might be the restriction for the traffic sellers from the envelope
stealers as the victims become common among the different envelope stealers. However, to come to
a conclusion on this point, a detailed analysis on the coding style and the type of attack used needs to
be figured out which is out of scope for this study. Figures 14, 15 and 16 show screenshots of the
examples of malicious websites under this category.
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