LogoMotive: detecting logos to identify online scams

Logos are widely used on websites, with both benign and malicious intentions. We developed LogoMotive, a system that detects logos on websites and provides analysts with insights into their logo’s (mis)use. LogoMotive crawls a list of domain names, takes screenshots of their homepage and detects logos on those screenshots.

Research paper

We evaluated LogoMotive in two pilot studies with the Dutch national government and Thuiswinkel Waarborg, a widely recognized trust mark certificate issuer for webshops in The Netherlands. For a full description of these studies and LogoMotive itself, please download our research paper.

Citation:

van den Hout T., Wabeke T., Moura G.C.M., Hesselman C. (2022) LogoMotive: detecting logos on websites to identify online scams - a TLD case study. In: Hohlfeld O., Moura G.C.M., Pelsser C. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2022.

Bibtex:

@inproceedings{Hout2022a,
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_1},
  author = {Thijs van den Hout and Thymen Wabeke and Giovane C. M. Moura and Cristian Hesselman},
  title = {LogoMotive: detecting logos on websites to identify online scams - a TLD case study},
  booktitle = {Passive and Active Measurement},
  publisher = {Springer International Publishing},
  year = {2022},
}

Software

LogoMotive can be applied to any DNS zone and can easily be trained to detect different logos. Hence, we make LogoMotive’s source code available upon request for academic purposes and actively promote deployment by peer registries such that LogoMotive can be used to find abuse in other DNS zones besides .nl.

Request access

Please follow these steps to request access to the code:

Download and read the licence agreement.
Send an email with the signed agreement and a short description of how you plan use the code to sidnlabs at sidn dot nl
If we honor your request, we will countersign the agreement, send it back, and give you access to LogoMotive’s GitHub repository.
You can review, use, and improve LogoMotive. :-)

Please contact us if you have any questions about the code or this procedure.

Contact

E-mail: sidnlabs at sidn dot nl
Last updated 21 March 2022