📦 Link Shield

Link Shield is a lightweight cybersecurity-focused npm package that detects suspicious and malicious URLs using heuristics, fuzzy matching, and threat intelligence patterns. It helps developers, security teams, and applications identify phishing attempts, typosquatting domains, dangerous downloads, obfuscated IPs, suspicious TLDs, and other link-based threats.

🛡️ Why Cybersecurity Teams Need This

More than 90% of cyberattacks start with a malicious link — whether in phishing emails, social engineering messages, or compromised websites. Attackers commonly use:

• Typosquatting domains (paypa1.com, g00gle.net)
• Free hosting/CDNs (Firebase, Dropbox, GitHub raw)
• Obfuscation tricks (punycode, encoded IPs, double extensions)
• Dangerous downloads (.exe, .apk, .scr)

Link Shield provides a simple way to detect and score these threats automatically. It can be integrated into:

• 📨 Email security filters (detect phishing links in inbound emails)
• 🌐 Web applications (protect users from malicious redirects)
• 🔍 Threat intelligence pipelines (scan large volumes of URLs)
• 🧑‍💻 DevSecOps tooling (validate links in CI/CD or monitoring scripts)

🚀 Features

• ✅ Detects phishing & typosquatting with fuzzy matching
• ✅ Identifies malicious protocols (javascript:, data:, file:)
• ✅ Flags suspicious TLDs (.xyz, .tk, .ru)
• ✅ Catches obfuscation tricks (punycode, Unicode homoglyphs, hex IPs)
• ✅ Detects dangerous downloads (.exe, .apk, .scr)
• ✅ Warns on free hosting/CDN abuse (Dropbox, Firebase, GitHub raw, IPFS)
• ✅ Provides a risk score (0–100) with reasons for transparency

📦 Installation

npm install link-shield

or using yarn:

yarn add link-shield

⚡ Usage

const { detectSuspiciousLink } = require("link-shield");

const result = detectSuspiciousLink("http://g00gle.com/login");

console.log(result);

Example Output

{
  "url": "http://g00gle.com/login",
  "suspicious": true,
  "riskScore": 60,
  "reasons": [
    "Domain contains numbers (possible typosquatting)",
    "Lookalike domain detected: g00gle ≈ google",
    "Suspicious keyword in domain"
  ]
}

⚙️ API

detectSuspiciousLink(url, options)

• url (string, required) → The URL to analyze

• options (object, optional)

  • threshold (number, default: 20) → Minimum score to mark as suspicious

Returns:

{
  url: string;
  suspicious: boolean;
  riskScore: number; // 0–100
  reasons: string[];
}

🔐 Cybersecurity Use Cases

• Email Security → Filter malicious links in phishing campaigns
• Web Security → Block suspicious redirects or downloads before execution
• Threat Intelligence → Enrich suspicious indicators (IOCs) with scoring
• SOC Tools → Automate link triage in incident response
• CI/CD Security → Validate external links in codebases or docs

🧪 Testing

We use Jest for testing. Run tests with:

npm test

Example test case (test/detector.test.js):

const { detectSuspiciousLink } = require("../src");

test("flags g00gle.com as suspicious", () => {
  const result = detectSuspiciousLink("http://g00gle.com/login");
  expect(result.suspicious).toBe(true);
  expect(result.riskScore).toBeGreaterThan(20);
});

🔮 Roadmap

• <input disabled="" type="checkbox"> CLI support (npx link-shield <url>)
• <input disabled="" type="checkbox"> Configurable rule sets (enable/disable rules)
• <input disabled="" type="checkbox"> Integration with threat intelligence feeds
• <input disabled="" type="checkbox"> Browser extension integration
• <input disabled="" type="checkbox"> Machine-learning powered URL classification