A Large Scale Study and Classification of VirusTotal Reports on Phishing and Malware URLs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
VirusTotal (VT) is a widely used scanning service for researchers and practitioners to label malicious entities and predict new security threats. Unfortunately, it is little known to the end-users how VT URL scanners decide on the maliciousness of entities and the attack types they are involved in (e.g., phishing or malware-hosting websites). In this paper, we conduct a systematic comparative study on VT URL scanners' behavior for different attack types of malicious URLs, in terms of 1) detection specialties, 2) stability, 3) correlations between scanners, and 4) lead/lag behaviors. Our findings highlight that the VT scanners commonly disagree with each other on their detection and attack type classification, leading to challenges in ascertaining the maliciousness of a URL and taking prompt mitigation actions according to different attack types. This motivates us to present a new highly accurate classifier that helps correctly identify the attack types of malicious URLs at the early stage. This in turn assists practitioners in performing better threat aggregation and choosing proper mitigation actions for different attack types
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it