VLUS: Visual location-based URL screening tool for improved WWW security

Currently, numerous freeware URL screening tools are available online. While these tools exhibit various levels of sophistication in dealing with traditional web-based exploits, most of them are quite ineffective in detecting some more subtle forms of infection. In particular, most of these tools omit to detect and/or alert against drive-by-download injections that do not result in the download and/or execution of a malware, but instead (only) aim to tarnish the credibility of the compromised web-site or intrude on the privacy of its users. In this paper, we present our new Visual Location-Based URL Screening tool, named VLUS. We demonstrate that with this tool, various forms of drive-by-download injection (leading to redirection) can be easily spotted, irrespective of the nature of the injected content. The tool is also useful for the purposes of general web-page content analysis.