[Colloquium] Reminder: Talk by Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego Today
Katie Casey
caseyk at cs.uchicago.edu
Wed May 21 08:04:02 CDT 2008
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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