In today’s digitalized era, Online Social Networking platforms are growing to be a vital aspect of each individual’s daily life. The availability of the vast amount of information and their open nature attracts the interest of cybercriminals to create malicious bots. Malicious bots in these platforms are automated or semi-automated entities used in nefarious ways while simulating human behavior. Moreover, such bots pose serious cyber threats and security concerns to society and public opinion. They are used to exploit vulnerabilities for illicit benefits such as spamming, fake profiles, spreading inappropriate/false content, click farming, hashtag hijacking, and much more. Cybercriminals and researchers are always engaged in an arms race as new and updated bots are created to thwart ever-evolving detection technologies. This literature review attempts to compile and compare the most recent advancements in Machine Learning-based techniques for the detection and classification of bots on five primary social media platforms namely Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Weibo. We bring forth a concise overview of all the supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised methods, along with the details of the datasets provided by the researchers. Additionally, we provide a thorough breakdown of the extracted feature categories. Furthermore, this study also showcases a brief rundown of the challenges and opportunities encountered in this field, along with prospective research directions and promising angles to explore.

In recent years, the digital world has advanced significantly, particularly on the Internet, which is critical given that many of our activities are now conducted online. As a result of attackers’ inventive techniques, the risk of a cyberattack is rising rapidly. One of the most critical attacks is the malicious URL intended to extract unsolicited information by mainly tricking inexperienced end users, resulting in compromising the user’s system and causing losses of billions of dollars each year. As a result, securing websites is becoming more critical. In this paper, we provide an extensive literature review highlighting the main techniques used to detect malicious URLs that are based on machine learning models, taking into consideration the limitations in the literature, detection technologies, feature types, and the datasets used. Moreover, due to the lack of studies related to malicious Arabic website detection, we highlight the directions of studies in this context. Finally, as a result of the analysis that we conducted on the selected studies, we present challenges that might degrade the quality of malicious URL detectors, along with possible solutions.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak produced devastating effects on the global economy and the health of entire communities. Although the COVID-19 survival rate is high, the number of severe cases that result in death is increasing daily. A timely prediction of at-risk patients of COVID-19 with precautionary measures is expected to increase the survival rate of patients and reduce the fatality rate. This research provides a prediction method for the early identification of COVID-19 patients outcome based on patients characteristics monitored at home, while in quarantine. The study was performed using 287 COVID-19 samples of patients from the King Fahad University Hospital, Saudi Arabia. The data were analyzed using three classification algorithms, namely, logistic regression (LR), random forest (RF), and extreme gradient boosting (XGB). Initially, the data were preprocessed using several preprocessing techniques. Furthermore, 10-k cross-validation was applied for data partitioning and SMOTE for alleviating the data imbalance. Experiments were performed using twenty clinical features, identified as significant for predicting the survival versus the deceased COVID-19 patients. The results showed that RF outperformed the other classifiers with an accuracy of 0.95 and area under curve (AUC) of 0.99. The proposed model can assist the decision-making and health care professional by early identification of at-risk COVID-19 patients effectively.

With the emergence of technology, the usage of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is said to be increasing in people’s lives. Such devices can benefit the average individual, who does not necessarily have to have technical knowledge. The IoT can be found in home security and alarm systems, smart fridges, smart televisions, and more. Although small Internet-connected devices have numerous benefits and can help enhance people’s efficiency, they also can pose a security threat. Malicious actors often attempt to find new ways to exploit and utilize certain resources, and IoT devices are a perfect candidate for such exploitation due to the huge volume of active devices. This is particularly true for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which involve the exploitation of a massive number of devices, such as IoT devices, to act as bots and send fraudulent requests to services, thus obstructing them. To identify and detect whether such attacks have occurred or not in a network, there must be a reliable mechanism of detection based on adequate techniques. The most common technique for this purpose is artificial intelligence, which involves the use of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) to help identify cyberattacks. ML models involve algorithms that use structured data to learn from, predict outcomes from, and identify patterns. The goal of this paper is to review selected studies and publications relevant to the topic of DDoS detection in IoT-based networks using machine-learning-relevant publications. It offers a wealth of references for academics looking to define or expand the scope of their research in this area.

The significant growth in the use of the Internet and the rapid development of network technologies are associated with an increased risk of network attacks. Network attacks refer to all types of unauthorized access to a network including any attempts to damage and disrupt the network, often leading to serious consequences. Network attack detection is an active area of research in the community of cybersecurity. In the literature, there are various descriptions of network attack detection systems involving various intelligent-based techniques including machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models. However, although such techniques have proved useful within specific domains, no technique has proved useful in mitigating all kinds of network attacks. This is because some intelligent-based approaches lack essential capabilities that render them reliable systems that are able to confront different types of network attacks. This was the main motivation behind this research, which evaluates contemporary intelligent-based research directions to address the gap that still exists in the field. The main components of any intelligent-based system are the training datasets, the algorithms, and the evaluation metrics; these were the main benchmark criteria used to assess the intelligent-based systems included in this research article. This research provides a rich source of references for scholars seeking to determine their scope of research in this field. Furthermore, although the paper does present a set of suggestions about future inductive directions, it leaves the reader free to derive additional insights about how to develop intelligent-based systems to counter current and future network attacks.

The World Wide Web services are essential in our daily lives and are available to communities through Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Attackers utilize such means of communication and create malicious URLs to conduct fraudulent activities and deceive others by creating deceptive and misleading websites and domains. Such threats open the doors for many critical attacks such as spams, spyware, phishing, and malware. Therefore, detecting malicious URL is crucially important to prevent the occurrence of many cybercriminal activities. In this study, we examined a set of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to detect malicious websites using a dataset comprising 66,506 records of URLs. We engineered three different types of features including lexical-based, network-based and content-based features. To extract the most discriminative features in the dataset, we applied several features selection algorithms, namely, correlation analysis, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and chi-square. Finally, we conducted a comparative performance evaluation for several ML and DL models considering set of criteria commonly used to evaluate such models. Results depicted that Naïve Bayes (NB) was the best model for detecting malicious URLs using the applied data with an accuracy of 96%. This research has made contribution to the field by conducting significant features engineering and analysis to identify the best features for malicious URLs predictions, compare different models and achieve a high accuracy using a large new URL dataset.