Hasan Dağ

Furkan Çolhak, Mert İlhan Ecevit, Bilal Emir Uçar et al.

The way we communicate and work has changed significantly with the rise of the Internet. While it has opened up new opportunities, it has also brought about an increase in cyber threats. One common and serious threat is phishing, where cybercriminals employ deceptive methods to steal sensitive information.This study addresses the pressing issue of phishing by introducing an advanced detection model that meticulously focuses on HTML content. Our proposed approach integrates a specialized Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model for structured tabular data and two pretrained Natural Language Processing (NLP) models for analyzing textual features such as page titles and content. The embeddings from these models are harmoniously combined through a novel fusion process. The resulting fused embeddings are then input into a linear classifier. Recognizing the scarcity of recent datasets for comprehensive phishing research, our contribution extends to the creation of an up-to-date dataset, which we openly share with the community. The dataset is meticulously curated to reflect real-life phishing conditions, ensuring relevance and applicability. The research findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach, with the CANINE demonstrating superior performance in analyzing page titles and the RoBERTa excelling in evaluating page content. The fusion of two NLP and one MLP model,termed MultiText-LP, achieves impressive results, yielding a 96.80 F1 score and a 97.18 accuracy score on our research dataset. Furthermore, our approach outperforms existing methods on the CatchPhish HTML dataset, showcasing its efficacies.

Furkan Çolhak, Mert İlhan Ecevit, Hasan Dağ et al.

The escalating landscape of cyber threats, characterized by the registration of thousands of new domains daily for large-scale Internet attacks such as spam, phishing, and drive-by downloads, underscores the imperative for innovative detection methodologies. This paper introduces a cutting-edge approach for identifying suspicious domains at the onset of the registration process. The accompanying data pipeline generates crucial features by comparing new domains to registered domains, emphasizing the crucial similarity score. The proposed system analyzes semantic and numerical attributes by leveraging a novel combination of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including a pretrained CANINE model and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) models, providing a robust solution for early threat detection. This integrated Pretrained NLP (CANINE) + MLP model showcases the outstanding performance, surpassing both individual pretrained NLP models and standalone MLP models. With an F1 score of 84.86\% and an accuracy of 84.95\% on the SecureReg dataset, it effectively detects malicious domain registrations. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the integrated approach and contribute to the ongoing efforts to develop proactive strategies to mitigate the risks associated with illicit online activities through the early identification of suspicious domain registrations.

Ferhat Demirkıran, Aykut Çayır, Uğur Ünal et al.

Classification of malware families is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of how they can infect devices, computers, or systems. Thus, malware identification enables security researchers and incident responders to take precautions against malware and accelerate mitigation. API call sequences made by malware are widely utilized features by machine and deep learning models for malware classification as these sequences represent the behavior of malware. However, traditional machine and deep learning models remain incapable of capturing sequence relationships between API calls. On the other hand, the transformer-based models process sequences as a whole and learn relationships between API calls due to multi-head attention mechanisms and positional embeddings. Our experiments demonstrate that the transformer model with one transformer block layer surpassed the widely used base architecture, LSTM. Moreover, BERT or CANINE, pre-trained transformer models, outperformed in classifying highly imbalanced malware families according to evaluation metrics, F1-score, and AUC score. Furthermore, the proposed bagging-based random transformer forest (RTF), an ensemble of BERT or CANINE, has reached the state-of-the-art evaluation scores on three out of four datasets, particularly state-of-the-art F1-score of 0.6149 on one of the commonly used benchmark dataset.

Berkant Düzgün, Aykut Çayır, Ferhat Demirkıran et al.

Nowadays, malware and malware incidents are increasing daily, even with various antivirus systems and malware detection or classification methodologies. Machine learning techniques have been the main focus of the security experts to detect malware and determine their families. Many static, dynamic, and hybrid techniques have been presented for that purpose. In this study, the static analysis technique has been applied to malware samples to extract API calls, which is one of the most used features in machine/deep learning models as it represents the behavior of malware samples. Since the rapid increase and continuous evolution of malware affect the detection capacity of antivirus scanners, recent and updated datasets of malicious software became necessary to overcome this drawback. This paper introduces two new datasets: One with 14,616 samples obtained and compiled from VirusShare and one with 9,795 samples from VirusSample. In addition, benchmark results based on static API calls of malware samples are presented using several machine and deep learning models on these datasets. We believe that these two datasets and benchmark results enable researchers to test and validate their methods and approaches in this field.

Aykut Çayır, Uğur Ünal, Hasan Dağ

Behavior of a malware varies with respect to malware types. Therefore,knowing type of a malware affects strategies of system protection softwares. Many malware type classification models empowered by machine and deep learning achieve superior accuracies to predict malware types.Machine learning based models need to do heavy feature engineering and feature engineering is dominantly effecting performance of models.On the other hand, deep learning based models require less feature engineering than machine learning based models. However, traditional deep learning architectures and components cause very complex and data sensitive models. Capsule network architecture minimizes this complexity and data sensitivity unlike classical convolutional neural network architectures. This paper proposes an ensemble capsule network model based on bootstrap aggregating technique. The proposed method are tested on two malware datasets, whose the-state-of-the-art results are well-known.