Analyzing Web Usage Data to Detect Threat Patterns

Webroot Computer Science, 2019-20

Liaison(s): Michael Balloni ’98, Hal Lonas, Trung Tran, Brittany Wang ’19, Fred Yip
Advisor(s): Lisa Kaczmarczyk
Students(s): Jill Cardamon (PM), Nisha Bhatia, Riley Julianne Lin, Riley Mangan

Webroot provides cybersecurity and threat intelligence services through network, endpoint and cloud-based protection. The goal of our project with Webroot is to explore methods of matching URL fingerprints to identify malicious URLs in real-time. Our Clinic team uses human- and machine-generated features in combination with machine learning models and neural networks to determine the maliciousness of websites. As an end-to-end pipeline, we created a cross-browser extension that identifies the maliciousness of the current URL and visualizes the results.