Digital Watering Hole Attack Detection Using Sequential Pattern

Abstract

Internet plays a vital role in day to day communication, business transactions etc and thus unavoidable. But many of the users are lagging in using the same in a secured manner which increases the possibility of attack. In 2017, Attackers had targeted dozens of global banks with new malware. Watering hole attacks attempt to infect more than 100 organizations in 31 different countries. It is becoming very difficult to detect and prevent the cyber attacks, since new attacks are increasing day by day. A watering hole attack is a computer attack in which the attacker aims to victim the kind of websites that the target group go to often and checks these websites for vulnerabilities. After that by injecting Java Script or HTML redirects the victim to a separate site hosting the exploit code for the chosen vulnerability. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to detect the possibility of watering hole attack using support count and confidence of the sequence pattern mining. Further by analysing the website URL links, alarming the users about the watering hole attack.