Safeguarding Web Surfing with URL Blacklisting

The growth of Information Technology and Communication has led the world to a dramatic change. People stay connected to each other and are able to access almost every service globally. But cyberspace also opened a new platform for criminal activities because people have to provide the most private information such as user name, password, credit card information, social security number. There are a lot of malware in the web which are designed to conduct various cyber crimes, such as gaining control of the victim system, stealing private information, launching denial-of-service attacks and spamming. Even though there are some good firewalls, anyone can be the victim of cyber attack. In this paper we surveyed on various methods of cyber attacks, attempts to mitigate them, their strength and weakness. We also discuss on generic architecture of URL blacklisting that are being used by various malware detection system.