Nicholas Weaver, Serendipity and Spam (October 6, 2011)
From the CISR video library (http://www.cisr.us)
Dr. Nicholas Weaver, ICSI/UC Berkeley
Serendipity and Spam
October 6, 2011
at the
Naval Postgraduate School
(http://www.nps.edu)
ABSTRACT
What happens when a large research group sets out to read a billion spams? A voyage of discovery through the underground economy which provides a major economic driver for botnets, spam, and other malfeasance. This talk describes the trip, including how we could identify the major programs based on the internal structure of their web pages, evaluate the (in)effectiveness of computer-infrastructure takedown and effectiveness of financial disruption, learn how to manage the press, discover what people purchase from spamvertized pharmacies, and provide estimates on the total revenue derived from (the V-word) spam.
About Dr. Nicholas Weaver
Dr. Nicholas Weaver is a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley as well as the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests are eclectic, as his dissertation was on FPGAs; he's known for his work on worms and malcode, including first postulating how very fast (less than 15 minute) Internet worms would operate, and is one of the primary developers of the Netalyzr network diagnostic tool.