[Colloquium] Talk by Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego on May 21, 2008

[Katie Casey]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Date: Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251, 1100 E. 58th Street

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Speaker:	Stefan Savage

From:		University of California, San Diego

Web page:	http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~savage/

Title: Exploring the Underground Economy

Abstract: New threats are inevitably driven by changes in  
opportunity.  Nowhere is this more true than on the Internet, where a  
decade of e-commerce growth has imparted significant value to the data  
stored on servers and user desktops.  At the same time, the  
combination of widespread software homogeneity and unrestricted high- 
speed connectivity have created “perfect storm” conditions for large- 
scale outbreaks of network-borne infections.  Indeed, over the last  
decade, the ability to easily compromise large numbers of Internet  
hosts has emerged as the backbone of a vibrant criminal economy  
encompassing unsolicited bulk-email (SPAM), denial-of-service  
extortion, piracy, phishing and identity theft.  Using tools such as  
worms, viruses, and web-based exploits, the technical cadre of this  
community can leverage a small investment in software into a large- 
scale virtual commodity – hundreds of thousands of remotely controlled  
“bot” hosts – that are then used, resold and leased to others. This  
capability effectively provides a platform upon which higher-level  
criminal applications are deployed (such as SPAM forwarding, DDoS,  
piracy, etc.)  In this talk I will describe the growth of this  
ecosystem, explore a particular  criminal operation in depth and  
present preliminary data quantifying the emergence of a vibrant third- 
party market economy in support of on-line crime.
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