Paper Info
Title
The underground economy of spam: a botmaster's perspective of coordinating large-scale spam campaigns
Abstract
Spam accounts for a large portion of the email exchange on the Internet. In addition to being a nuisance and a waste of costly resources, spam is used as a delivery mechanism for many criminal scams and large-scale compromises. Most of this spam is sent using botnets, which are often rented for a fee to criminal organizations. Even though there has been a considerable corpus of research focused on combating spam and analyzing spam-related botnets, most of these efforts have had a limited view of the entire spamming process. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of a large-scale botnet from the botmaster's perspective, that highlights the intricacies involved in orchestrating spam campaigns such as the quality of email address lists, the effectiveness of IP-based blacklisting, and the reliability of bots. This is made possible by having access to a number of command-and-control servers used by the Pushdo/Cutwail botnet. In addition, we study Spamdot.biz, a private forum used by some of the most notorious spam gangs, to provide novel insights into the underground economy of large-scale spam operations.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2011
LEET
large-scale spam campaign,cutwail botnet,underground economy,criminal organization,spam campaign,large-scale spam operation,large-scale botnet,email address list,criminal scam,combating spam,notorious spam gang,large-scale compromise
Field
DocType
Citations 
Cutwail botnet,Internet privacy,Social spam,Srizbi botnet,Computer science,Botnet,Computer security,Spambot,Economy,Forum spam,Email address,Spamming
Conference
59
PageRank 
References 
Authors
3.13
15
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Brett Stone-Gross152128.74
T HORSTEN HOLZ23532232.93
Gianluca Stringhini370161.87
Giovanni Vigna47121507.72
ruhruniversity bochum5623.55