Case Study: University of Calabria Detects Malicious URLs with WhoisXML API

Malicious URL detection via machine learning

The University of Calabria needed a reliable way to help detect malicious URLs, a challenge made harder by the sheer volume and constant change of dangerous websites. To support their research, they turned to WhoisXML API for accurate Whois data that could be used in machine-learning analysis of suspicious sites.

WhoisXML API provided fast, programmatically accessible Whois lookup services that the researchers could use in their preferred programming languages. This enabled the University of Calabria to build and test a scalable classifier for malicious URL detection, and the approach was successfully demonstrated on real datasets of up to 11,975 URLs, including 5,090 malicious and 6,885 benign sites.

University of Calabria