Cloud security vendor Zscaler has launched a new free-to-use online service called Zulu that can assess the security risk associated with URLs by analyzing the content they point to, as well as the reputation of their corresponding domain names and IP addresses.
There are several free URL scanning services available online and all of them are useful in their own right. While conceptually similar to other such scanners, Zulu does have a few features that makes it stand out.
For example, Zulu allows security-savvy users who investigate various Web attacks to choose what User-Agent and Referrer headers the scanner will use when accessing a URL.
There are a lot of attack pages that only serve malicious content to visitors who arrive there from a certain website, most commonly a search engine, or only to visitors who use a certain browser.
Zulu assesses the risk of a Web resource's content, its URL and host individually and assigns a score for each of these categories based on several tests. The scores are then combined to determine the overall risk associated with the resource.
"A unique benefit of this approach is that we can deliver a risk score even when the page content is no longer available," said Michael Sutton, vice president of security research at Zscaler, in
a blog post on Wednesday.
"While we can't access the page, we can still assess the URL and host and when they deliver a high risk score despite a lack of page content, one can often conclude the page was indeed malicious but has since been taken down," he explained.
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