NeuralAS: Deep Word-Based Spoofed URLs Detection Against Strong Similar Samples

Spoofed URLs are associated with various cyber crimes such as phishing and ransomware etc. Most existing detection approaches design a set of hand-crafted features and feed them to machine learning classifiers. However, designing such features is a time consuming and labor intensive process. This paper proposes an approach named NeuralAS (Neural Anti-Spoofing) by segmenting URLs into word sequences and detecting spoofed URLs with recurrent neural networks. As a result, NeuralAS can perform detection with high-abstract and poor-interpretable features learned automatically, and achieve accurate detection with contextual information in sequences. We also propose a novel method to construct indistinguishable data sets of strong similar samples, which can be used to evaluate the robustness of different approaches. Extensive experimental results show that NeuralAS works well on spoofed URLs detection, and has a significant effectiveness and robustness even on strong similar data sets.