Operational Domain Name Classification: From Automatic Ground Truth Generation to Adaptation to Missing Values

With more than 350 million active domain names and at least 200,000 newly registered domains per day, it is technically and economically challenging for Internet intermediaries involved in domain registration and hosting to monitor them and accurately assess whether they are benign, likely registered with malicious intent, or have been compromised. This observation motivates the design and deployment of automated approaches to support investigators in preventing or effectively mitigating security threats. However, building a domain name classification system suitable for deployment in an operational environment requires meticulous design: from feature engineering and acquiring the underlying data to handling missing values resulting from, for example, data collection errors. The design flaws in some of the existing systems make them unsuitable for such usage despite their high theoretical accuracy. Even worse, they may lead to erroneous decisions, for example, by registrars, such as suspending a benign domain name that has been compromised at the website level, causing collateral damage to the legitimate registrant and website visitors. In this paper, we propose novel approaches to designing domain name classifiers that overcome the shortcomings of some existing systems. We validate these approaches with a prototype based on the COMAR (COmpromised versus MAliciously Registered domains) system focusing on its careful design, automated and reliable ground truth generation, feature selection, and the analysis of the extent of missing values. First, our classifier takes advantage of automatically generated ground truth based on publicly available domain name registration data. We then generate a large number of machine-learning models, each dedicated to handling a set of missing features: if we need to classify a domain name with a given set of missing values, we use the model without the missing feature set, thus allowing classification based on all other features. We estimate the importance of features using scatter plots and analyze the extent of missing values due to measurement errors. Finally, we apply the COMAR classifier to unlabeled phishing URLs and find, among other things, that 73% of corresponding domain names are maliciously registered. In comparison, only 27% are benign domains hosting malicious websites. The proposed system has been deployed at two ccTLD registry operators to support their anti-fraud practices.