Title
Design and Evaluation of a Real-Time URL Spam Filtering Service
Abstract
On the heels of the widespread adoption of web services such as social networks and URL shorteners, scams, phishing, and malware have become regular threats. Despite extensive research, email-based spam filtering techniques generally fall short for protecting other web services. To better address this need, we present Monarch, a real-time system that crawls URLs as they are submitted to web services and determines whether the URLs direct to spam. We evaluate the viability of Monarch and the fundamental challenges that arise due to the diversity of web service spam. We show that Monarch can provide accurate, real-time protection, but that the underlying characteristics of spam do not generalize across web services. In particular, we find that spam targeting email qualitatively differs in significant ways from spam campaigns targeting Twitter. We explore the distinctions between email and Twitter spam, including the abuse of public web hosting and redirector services. Finally, we demonstrate Monarch's scalability, showing our system could protect a service such as Twitter -- which needs to process 15 million URLs/day -- for a bit under $800/day.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/SP.2011.25
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Keywords
Field
DocType
Web services,information filtering,invasive software,social networking (online),unsolicited e-mail,Monarch scalability,Twitter spam,URL shorteners,email based spam filtering techniques,malware,phishing,public web hosting,real-time URL Spam filtering service,redirector services,scams,social networks,underlying characteristics,web services
Internet privacy,World Wide Web,Social spam,HTML email,Web threat,Computer science,Computer security,Spam and Open Relay Blocking System,Spambot,Sping,Forum spam,Spamming
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1081-6011 E-ISBN : 978-0-7695-4402-1
978-0-7695-4402-1
180
PageRank 
References 
Authors
8.89
32
4
Search Limit
100180
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kurt Thomas1118956.78
Chris Grier2153375.00
Ma, J.31999.95
Vern Paxson4140312130.20