Exploring URL Datasets for Web Security and Phishing Detection

URL datasets are invaluable resources for web security, particularly in the realm of phishing detection. This article explores various sources and datasets available for these purposes, providing you with the necessary tools and knowledge to enhance your web security strategies.

Where Can You Find URL Datasets?

Searching for reliable URL datasets involves a mix of both public and private sources. Here are some effective options to consider:

Common Crawl

Common Crawl is a non-profit organization that systematically indexes the world's publicly available web content. They offer a vast dataset of web pages, including URLs. This comprehensive resource is accessible through their website: Common Crawl.

Kaggle

Kaggle hosts a wide variety of datasets, including those that contain URLs. If you're looking for specific datasets related to URLs or web scraping, you can search on their dataset page: Kaggle Datasets.

GitHub

Many developers and researchers share their datasets on GitHub. You can search for repositories with URL-related projects. A keyword search with "Web Archive" can lead you to useful repositories.

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive offers the Wayback Machine, a powerful tool for accessing historical web data. This platform allows you to explore archived URLs and datasets related to web pages. You can access the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine at Internet Archive.

Academic Publications

Research papers in fields like web mining or data science often include datasets as supplementary material. Websites like or Scholar Google can be particularly useful for finding such papers. These can be essential for academic and commercial purposes as well.

Data.gov

If you're looking for datasets related to government websites or public data, Data.gov is a valuable resource. They provide various datasets, some of which may include URLs. You can explore these datasets at Data.gov.

Web Scraping

For highly specific needs, you might consider writing a web scraper using libraries like Beautiful Soup or Scrapy in Python. Unlike the datasets mentioned above, web scraping allows you to define criteria and collect URLs that meet your exact requirements.

Specific URL Datasets for Phishing Detection

Below, we focus on some specific datasets that are particularly useful for phishing detection.

Website Fishing Dataset

Website Phishing Data Set from the UCI Machine Learning Repository is a notable example. This dataset is valuable for identifying phishing websites. It consists of 1,353 websites, including 702 phishing URLs and 103 suspicious URLs (which could be either phishy or legitimate). The features include:

URL Anchor Request URL SFH (Suggestive Freelisting Host) URL Length Having @ Prefix/Suffix IP Sub Domain Web Traffic Domain Age Class

The class attribute holds categorical values of "Legitimate", "Suspicious", and "Phishy", which have been replaced with numerical values 1, 0, and -1, respectively.

SecRepo Security Datasets

The SecRepo repository provides other important security and threat feed URL datasets:

Clean MX Phishing DB: Contains URLs and IPs associated with phishing emails, along with targets. Clean MX Virus DB: Provides labeled URLs and IPs associated with various types of malware. CyberCrime Tracker: Offers labeled URLs and IPs for various malware families.

These datasets are critical for detecting and preventing phishing attacks and other forms of cybercrime.

Conclusion

By exploring the diverse range of URL datasets available, you can significantly enhance your web security measures, particularly in combating phishing. Whether you're a researcher, developer, or security professional, these resources provide the foundational data necessary for effective detection and prevention strategies.