US Patent 8495742 Identifying malicious queries

A framework identifies malicious queries contained in search logs to uncover relationships between the malicious queries and the potential attacks launched by attackers submitting the malicious queries. A small seed set of malicious queries may be used to identify an IP address in the search logs that submitted the malicious queries. The seed set may be expanded by examining all queries in the search logs submitted by the identified IP address. Regular expressions may be generated from the expanded set of queries and used for detecting yet new malicious queries. Upon identifying the malicious queries, the framework may be used to detect attacks on vulnerable websites, spamming attacks, and phishing attacks.