Categories
Papers Publications

Paper at Global Internet 2010

Chris Wilcox presented a paper titled “Correlating Spam Activity with IP Address Characteristics” In Global Inernet 2010. The paper uses Lander survey data as well as spam data from eSoft.

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 spambot 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.

Categories
Papers Publications

Paper at NPSec

Steve DiBenedetto presented a paper titled “Fingerprinting Custom Botnet Protocol Stacks” at NPSec 2010, in Kyoto Japan.

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Presentations

New Video About Address Utilization and Allocations on Map Browser

The ANT project released a video describing Internet address allocation and how we study address utilization with IPv4 censuses. Aniruddh Rao prepared this video, working with John Heidemann and Xue Cai.

a scene from the ANT video describing address allocation and census taking

We have also updated our web-based IPv4 address browser to provide information about to what organizations each address block is allocated. The map now visualizes the whois allocation data; we thank the five regional internet registries for sharing this data with us and authorizing this visualization.

organizations in our Internet map

Finally, our web-based IPv4 address browser now has better time travel, with nearly 30 different census from Dec. 2005 to Nov. 2010, and we continue to update the map regularly.

Data collection for this work is through the LANDER project, and the map browser improvements are due to AMITE, both supported by DHS. Video preparation was supported by these projects and NSF through the MADCAT project.