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Despite the intent of ensuring safe transit of information
to and from a trusted website, encrypted protocols (usually HTTPS) do little to
validate that the content of certified websites is safe.
With the widespread usage of HTTPS protocols on major
websites, network and security devices relying on interception of user traffic
to apply filtering policies have lost visibility into page-level traffic.
Cybercriminals can take advantage of this encryption to hide malicious content on
secure connections, leaving users vulnerable to visiting malicious URLs within supposedly
benign domains.
This limited visibility affects network devices that are
unable to implement SSL/TLS decrypt functionality due to limited resources,
cost, and capabilities. These devices are typically meant for home or small
business use, but are also found in the enterprise arena, meaning the impact of
this limited visibility can be widespread.
With 25% of malicious URLs identified by Webroot hosted within
benign domains in 2019, a deeper view into underlying URLs is necessary to
provide additional context to make better, more informed decisions when the
exact URL path isn’t available.
Digging Deeper with Advanced Threat Intel
The BrightCloud® Web Classification and Web Reputation
Services offers technology providers the most effective way to supplement
domain-level visibility. Using cloud-based analytics and machine learning with
more than 10 years of real-world refinement, BrightCloud® Threat Intelligence services
have classified more than 842 million domains and 37 billion URLs to-date and can
generate a predictive risk score for every domain on the internet.
The Domain Safety Score, available as a premium feature with
BrightCloud® Web Classification and Reputation services, can be a valuable
metric for filtering decisions when there is lack of path-level visibility on
websites using HTTPs protocols. Even technology partners who do have
path-level visibility can benefit from using the Domain Safety Score to avoid
the complexity and compliance hurdles of deciding when to decrypt user traffic.
The Domain Safety Score is available for every domain and
represents the estimated safety of the content found within that domain,
ranging from 1 to 100, with 1 being the least safe. A domain with a low score
has a higher predictive risk of having content within its pages that could
compromise the security of users and systems, such as phishing forms or
malicious downloads.
Using these services, organizations can implement and
enforce effective web policies that protect users against web threats, whether
encrypted through HTTPs or not.
Devising Domain Safety Scores
As mentioned, a Domain Safety Score represents the estimated
safety of the content found within that domain. This enables better security
filtering decisions for devices with minimal page-level visibility due to
increasing adoption of HTTPS encryption.
How do we do it?
BrightCloud uses high-level input features to help determine
Domain Safety Scores, including:
- Domain attribute data, including publicly
available information associated with the domain, such as registry information,
certificate information, IP address information, and the domain name itself. - Behavioral features obtained from
historical records of known communication events with the domain, gathered from
real-world endpoints. - A novel deep-learning architecture employing
multiple deep, recurrent neural networks to extract sequence information,
feeding them into a classification network that is fully differentiable. This
allows us to use the most cutting-edge technology to leverage as much
information possible from a domain to determine a safety score. - Model training using a standard
backpropagation through time algorithm, fully unrolling all sequences to
calculate gradients. In order to train such a network on a huge dataset, we
have developed a custom framework that optimizes the memory footprint to run
efficiently on GPU resources in a supercomputing cluster. This approach allows
us to train models faster and iterate quickly so we can remain responsive and
adapt to large changes in the threat landscape over time.
A secure connection doesn’t have to compromise your privacy.
That’s why Webroot’s Domain Safety Scores peek below the domain level to the
places where up to a quarter of online threats lurk.
Learn more about Domain Safety Scores, here.
The post The Problem with HTTPS appeared first on Webroot Blog.