1/12/2011 Jennifer Applequist, Information Trust Institute
Written by Jennifer Applequist, Information Trust Institute
ECE Professor David M. Nicol and ECE alumnus (BSEE ’07, MSEE ’10) Kurt Thomas won the Best Paper Award at MALWARE 2010. Nicol is a researcher in the Information Trust Institute.
The paper, entitled "The Koobface Botnet and the Rise of Social Malware," examines the Koobface botnet, which has aggressively exploited online social networks. It studies Koobface's zombie infrastructure and analyzes one month of its activity in Facebook and Twitter.
The authors succeeded in infiltrating the Koobface botnet to identify fraudulent and compromised user accounts that had been used to propagate malicious material to over 213,000 social network users.
Based on data gathered in spring 2010, they found that social network operators' strategy of using domain blacklisting services was highly ineffective. The defenses were found to recognize just 27% of threats and even then take an average of 4 days to respond.
MALWARE 2010 was the 5th IEEE International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software, held in Nancy, France, on October 19-20. The conference focused on techniques, economics, and legal issues surrounding the topic of malware, particularly methods to detect and control malware.