[Colloquium] JOB TALK TODAY: Chris Kanich, UCSD

[Katie Casey]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Date: Monday, February 6, 2012
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: RY 251

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Speaker:		Chris Kanich

From:		University of California, San Diego

Web page:	http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ckanich/

Title: 		Understanding Spam Economics
	

Abstract: Over the past two decades, the Internet has become an essential tool
in the lives of millions of people. Unfortunately, this success has
also attracted cybercriminals who exploit the Internet as a platform
for illicit gain.  Perhaps the most familiar scam is sending
unsolicited advertisements (spam), clogging inboxes and putting
people's computers at risk of dangerous malware infections.
Understanding the mechanisms and effectiveness of these scams is
essential to building effective countermeasures to cybercrime. In this
talk, I'll explain the modern spamming landscape and present research
that help us better understand how spammers make their money online.
One effort uses the technique of botnet infiltration to examine a spam
campaign from the point of view of the spammers. Botnet infiltration
allows us to measure their operation including the advertisements'
effectiveness and the worldwide use of spam filtering techniques. The
second effort exploits key information leaks to answer key questions
about the modern affiliate marketing-based spam ecosystem, from
estimating their worldwide gross revenue, to understanding customer
demographics and their most popular products. I'll end by discussing
future work in this space and outline research directions that exploit
criminal's online architecture and motivations to develop effective
defenses.

Host: Ian Foster

Refreshments will be served in Ryerson 255 following the talk at 3:30.
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