Web application reconnaissance scan detection using LSTM network based deep learning

Web applications are frequent targets of attack due to their widespread use and round the clock availability. Malicious users can exploit vulnerabilities in web applications to steal sensitive information, modify and destroy data as well as deface web applications. The process of exploiting web applications is a multi-step process and the first step in an attack is reconnaissance, in which the attacker tries to gather information about the target web application. In this step, the attacker uses highly efficient automated scanning tools to scan web applications. Following reconnaissance, the attacker proceeds to vulnerability scanning and subsequently attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities discovered to compromise the web application. Detection of reconnaissance scans by malicious users can be combined with other traditional intrusion detection and prevention systems to improve the security of web applications. In this paper, a method for detecting reconnaissance scans through analysis of web server access logs is proposed. The proposed approach uses an LSTM network based deep learning approach for detecting reconnaissance scans. Experiments conducted show that the proposed approach achieves a mean precision, recall and f1-score of 0.99 over three data sets and precision, recall and f1-score of 0.97, 0.96 and 0.96 over the combined dataset.