WebPatrol: automated collection and replay of web-based malware scenarios

Traditional remote-server-exploiting malware is quickly evolving and adapting to the new web-centric computing paradigm. By leveraging the large population of (insecure) web sites and exploiting the vulnerabilities at client-side modern (complex) browsers (and their extensions), web-based malware becomes one of the most severe and common infection vectors nowadays. While traditional malware collection and analysis are mainly focusing on binaries, it is important to develop new techniques and tools for collecting and analyzing web-based malware, which should include a complete web-based malicious logic to reflect the dynamic, distributed, multi-step, and multi-path web infection trails, instead of just the binaries executed at end hosts. This paper is a first attempt in this direction to automatically collect web-based malware scenarios (including complete web infection trails) to enable fine-grained analysis. Based on the collections, we provide the capability for offline "live" replay, i.e., an end user (e.g., an analyst) can faithfully experience the original infection trail based on her current client environment, even when the original malicious web pages are not available or already cleaned. Our evaluation shows that WebPatrol can collect/cover much more complete infection trails than state-of-the-art honeypot systems such as PHoneyC [11] and Capture-HPC [1]. We also provide several case studies on the analysis of web-based malware scenarios we have collected from a large national education and research network, which contains around 35,000 web sites.