Prof. Geoffrey Voelker

"Exploring the Technical and Economic Factors Underlying Internet Scams"

(Vortrag im Rahmen der "Distinguished Lecture Series" des "Max Planck Instituts für Software-Systeme")

Today, the large-scale compromise of Internet hosts serves as a platform for supporting a range of criminal activity in the so-called Internet underground economy. In this talk I will quickly survey work that our group has performed over the past decade on the problems posed by these threats, and how our research directions have evolved over time. In the remainder of the talk, I will describe recent work that our group has performed, including the ecosystem of CAPTCHA-solving service providers and an end-to-end analysis of the spam value chain. Using extensive measurements over months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and product purchases from a wide variety of spam-advertised sites, I'll characterize the relative prospects for anti-spam interventions at multiple levels.

This work is part of a larger effort of the Collaborative Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses (CCIED), a joint NSF Cybertrust Center with UCSD and ICSI (http://www.ccied.org), and an ONR MURI collaboration (http://www.sysnet.ucsd.edu/botnets).

Bio: Geoffrey M. Voelker is a Professor at the University of California at San Diego. His research interests include operating systems, distributed systems, and computer networks. He received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 1995 and 2000, respectively.