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New conference paper “Correlating Spam Activity with IP Address Characteristics” at Global Internet

The paper “Correlating Spam Activity with IP Address Characteristics” (available at PDF Format) was accepted and presented at Global Internet 2010. The focus of this paper is to quantify the collateral damage (legitimate mail servers incorrectly blacklisted) caused by the practice of blocking /24 address blocks based on the presence of spammers. The paper also revisits the differences in IP address characteristics and domain names between spammers and non-spammers.

From the abstract:

It is well known that spam bots mostly utilize compromised machines with certain address characteristics, such as dynamically allocated addresses, machines in specific geographic areas and IP ranges from AS’ with more tolerant spam policies. Such machines tend to be less diligently administered and may exhibit less stability, more volatility, and shorter uptimes. However, few studies have attempted to quantify how such spam bot address characteristics compare with non-spamming hosts. Quantifying these characteristics may help provide important information for comprehensive spam mitigation.

We use two large datasets, namely a commercial blacklist and an Internet-wide address visibility study to quantify address characteristics of spam and non-spam networks. We find that spam networks exhibit significantly less availability and uptime, and higher volatility than non-spam networks. In addition, we conduct a collateral damage study of a common practice where an ISP blocks the entire /24 prefix if spammers are detected in that range.  We find that such a policy blacklists a significant portion of legitimate mail servers belonging to the same prefix.

Citation: Chris Wilcox, Christos Papadopoulos, John Heidemann. Correlating Spam Activity with IP Address Characteristics.  Proceedings of the IEEE Global Internet Conference, San Diego, CA, USA, IEEE.  March, 2010.