Quantification and Modeling of Broken Links Prevalence in Hyper Traffic Websites Homepages

Broken links in websites external resources pose a serious threat to cybersecurity and the credibility of websites. They can be hijacked to eavesdrop user traffic or to inject malicious software. In this paper, we present the first result of an ongoing research. We focus on the prevalence of broken links in external resources on home pages of the most visited websites in the world. The analysis was conducted on the top 88 000 homepages extracted from the Majestic Million rankings. 35,2% of them have at least one broken link. We also identify the common causes of these broken links and highlight improper implementation of testing phases to prevent such errors. We provide a formal model for the distribution of external links. At the next research step, we are exploring the potential impact on privacy of broken links by analyzing inherited traffic of purchasable expired domains.