Network-Level Spam and Scam Defenses

Event details
Date | 15.06.2009 |
Hour | 15:15 |
Speaker | Prof. Nick Feamster, Georgia Tech, College of Computing, USA |
Location | |
Category | Conferences - Seminars |
This talk introduces a new class of methods called "behavioral blacklisting", which identify spammers based on their network-level behavior. Rather than attempting to blacklist individual spam messages based on what the message contains, behavioral blacklisting classifies a message based on how the message itself was sent (spatial and temporal traffic patterns of the email traffic itself). Behavioral blacklisting tracks the sending behavior of an email sender from a wide variety of vantage points and establishes "fingerprints" that are indicative of spamming behavior. Behavioral blacklisting can apply not only to email traffic, but also to the network-level behavior of hosting infrastructure for scam or phishing attacks. First, I will present a brief overview of our study of the network-level behavior of spammers. Second, I will describe two behavioral blacklisting algorithms that are based on insights from our study of the network-level behavior of spammers. Third, I will describe SpamSpotter, a real-time reputation system that integrates these algorithms. Finally, I will describe our ongoing work applying similar behavioral detection techniques to detecting both online scam hosting infrastructure and phishing attacks.
Prof. Feamster's homepage
Practical information
- General public
- Free