Website Defacement Detection and Monitoring Methods: A Review

Web attacks and web defacement attacks are issues in the web security world. Recently, website defacement attacks have become the main security threats for many organizations and governments that provide web-based services. Website defacement attacks can cause huge financial and data losses that badly affect the users and website owners and can lead to political and economic problems. Several detection techniques and tools are used to detect and monitor website defacement attacks. However, some of the techniques can work on static web pages, dynamic web pages, or both, but need to focus on false alarms. Many techniques can detect web defacement. Some are based on available online tools and some on comparing and classification techniques; the evaluation criteria are based on detection accuracies with 100% standards and false alarms that cannot reach 1.5% (and never 2%); this paper presents a literature review of the previous works related to website defacement, comparing the works based on the accuracy results, the techniques used, as well as the most efficient techniques.