The detection of fraudulent URLs that lead to malicious websites using addresses similar to those of legitimate websites is a key form of defense against phishing attacks. Currently, in the case of Internet of Things devices is especially relevant, because they usually have access to the Internet, although in many cases they are vulnerable to these phishing attacks. This paper offers an overview of the most relevant techniques for the accurate detection of fraudulent URLs, from the most widely used machine learning and deep learning algorithms, to the application, as a proof of concept, of classification models based on quantum machine learning. Starting from an essential data preparation phase, special attention is paid to the initial comparison of several traditional machine learning models, evaluating them with different datasets and obtaining interesting results that achieve true positive rates greater than 90%. After that first approach, the study moves on to the application of quantum machine learning, analysing the specificities of this recent field and assessing the possibilities it offers for the detection of malicious URLs. Given the limited available literature specifically on the detection of malicious URLs and other cybersecurity issues through quantum machine learning, the research presented here represents a relevant novelty on the combination of both concepts in the form of quantum machine learning algorithms for cybersecurity. Indeed, after the analysis of several algorithms, encouraging results have been obtained that open the door to further research on the application of quantum computing in the field of cybersecurity.

The evolution of cyberattacks requires a continuous race to implement increasingly sophisticated techniques that allow us to stay ahead of cybercriminals. Thus, a relevant inverse problem in cybersecurity involves determining underlying patterns or models of possible cyber threats based on observed data. In particular, the processing of massive data combined with the application of Machine Learning methods and other techniques derived from Artificial Intelligence have so far achieved very significant advances in preventing and mitigating the impact of many cyberattacks. Given that the keyword in cybersecurity is anticipation, this work explores the possibilities of quantum computing and, in particular, of Quantum Machine Learning to have, when the quantum computing era arrives, the most optimal parameterisations to put these models into practice. Although the application of quantum technologies in a real context may still seem distant, having studies to assess the future viability of Quantum Machine Learning to identify different types of cyberattacks may be a differential element when it comes to ensuring the cybersecurity of essential services. For this reason, this work aims to use several datasets of known problems in the field of cybersecurity to evaluate the most optimal parameterisations in some known Quantum Machine Learning models, comparing the results with those obtained using classical models. After analysing the results of this study, it can be concluded that Quantum Machine Learning techniques are promising in the context of cybersecurity, giving rise to future work on a wider range of cybersecurity datasets and Quantum Machine Learning algorithms.

Increasing digitalization exposes critical infrastructure to sophisticated cyber threats, requiring new approaches to improving security and resilience. While classical machine learning techniques have shown promise in anomaly detection and threat mitigation, emerging quantum-inspired methods offer new opportunities to enhance detection capabilities by leveraging principles derived from quantum computing. The objective of this work is to propose a model for the early detection of Telephony Denial of Service attacks using a combination of classical algorithms and quantum computing-based techniques. Call records are embedded into a low-dimensional quantum feature space using spatial and temporal attributes, mapped through a quantum kernel in two modalities: Quantum-Inspired Kernel or Qiskit-Simulated Quantum Kernel. This approach enables the identification of subtle and complex patterns that can be difficult to capture using classical methods alone, without the need for fully fault-tolerant quantum hardware. The anomaly decision threshold is empirically calibrated, allowing the detector to balance early sensitivity against false-alarm control under the evaluated Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP) traffic conditions. The evaluation shows that the proposed framework can improve threat detection and system resilience in critical infrastructure contexts. The results support the use of kernel-based quantum-inspired representations as a tunable early-warning layer for PSAP traffic monitoring, while also showing that threshold calibration and operational context remain necessary before deployment.