Fighting malware and spam

URLCheck: making the world a safer place

Sorin Mustaca Avira
Cosmin Luta Avira

Do you want to know how challenging it is to make the world safer by putting many different URL sources under the same umbrella?

It is exactly one year since we started URLCheck, a malware and phishing URL aggregator, first presented at last year's VB conference. The positive feedback received during and after the VB2008 conference convinced us to give something back to the community, which is generously helping to make the online world better.

To do this, the system has to process huge amount of information 24h per day and make sure it is available in real time to the customers. In order to serve as many concurrent clients as possible, a very powerful and solid back-end server was needed. We chose the Apache Server, extended with a special module to serve our purposes. But, being well known doesn't necessarily mean that it was easy to work with. Read the paper if you want to know the traps and pitfalls of it.

Imagine the customers of a bank being targeted by a phishing attack against their bank. The only way to warn them is to send dedicated real-time alerts to them and to their bank. For the tech-savvy readers we cover issues like data replication, fault tolerance, distributed caching, dynamic load balancing and many others topics.