How to detect malicious URLs using API

How to detect malicious URLs using API of the primary sources of cyber threats, which take advantage of weaknesses in a system or network to compromise personal and confidential data and elicit fraudulent transactions. Identifying these threats is critical to averting data breaches, protecting device and network integrity, and preserving the safety of users’ personal information.

To mitigate the threat, the Safe Browsing APIs let you check URLs against Google’s constantly updated lists of unsafe web resources. These lists include phishing sites, domains used to distribute malware and spam, and rogue sites that redirect you to malicious content. Using these APIs, you can integrate detection of malicious URLs into your own application.

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There are several ways to detect URLs, ranging from simple rules-based techniques to more sophisticated machine learning (ML) models. These techniques can differ in their effectiveness, but all detect URLs by extracting characteristics from the specific structure of a given URL.

Some of these characteristics are obvious, e.g., the length of a hostname, the first directory length, and the number of directories, while others are more hidden: the count of digits and letters in a URL, the use of a shortening service, or the category assigned to the site.

There are two main ways to query Web Risk for verdicts on a URL: the Lookup API and the Update API. The Lookup API has the lowest complexity, as it only requires the input of a URL and an associated verdict. The Update API has the added complexity of maintaining a local database and canonicalizing and formatting URLs before queries. Both have the added benefit of ensuring privacy and avoiding latency caused by network requests.