Significant Factors for Detecting Malicious Redirections

Malicious redirections refer to a technique where a genuine search user is befooled and made to pass through a chain of redirections and ultimately presented with a compromised web page that may be an adware or an irrelevant content for the user. As a consequence the search engines earn a bad name in quality information retrieval and moreover the users are too dissatisfied. Also, there is sever wastage of expensive network resources like bandwidth. Detecting these malicious redirections is important for quality information retrieval from web. But detecting such redirections is a very tedious task due to the genuine usage of redirections. Also, the conventional methods of spam detection such as blacklists, whitelists are not very successful as they need to be updated every time. This paper explores various reasons behind redirections and presents the redirection attack scenario. To design a more robust and reliable approach, we present some new factors that facilitate redirection spam detection. We also explored the operational profile of each identified factor along with the criteria for its selection.