SecureReg: Combining NLP and MLP for Enhanced Detection of Malicious Domain Name Registrations

The escalating landscape of cyber threats, characterized by the registration of thousands of new domains daily for large-scale Internet attacks such as spam, phishing, and drive-by downloads, underscores the imperative for innovative detection methodologies. This paper introduces a cutting-edge approach for identifying suspicious domains at the onset of the registration process. The accompanying data pipeline generates crucial features by comparing new domains to registered domains, emphasizing the crucial similarity score. The proposed system analyzes semantic and numerical attributes by leveraging a novel combination of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including a pretrained CANINE model and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) models, providing a robust solution for early threat detection. This integrated Pretrained NLP (CANINE) + MLP model showcases the outstanding performance, surpassing both individual pretrained NLP models and standalone MLP models. With an F1 score of 84.86% and an accuracy of 84.95% on the SecureReg dataset, it effectively detects malicious domain registrations. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the integrated approach and contribute to the ongoing efforts to develop proactive strategies to mitigate the risks associated with illicit online activities through the early identification of suspicious domain registrations.