Network Visualization

Friday, November 30. 2007
Best comic of the year related to my previous post and worm visualization in general: http://xkcd.com/350/

Storm Worm Visualization

Thursday, November 29. 2007
In the past few days, Storm was rather calm - most mails sent by this botnet were related to stock spam. Furthermore, the websites that host the actual malware sample currently do not have any content: they serve the usual file (sony.exe), but no HTML page is returned by the server.

Back in October, I created an ipmap, a 2D visualizations of IP address space similar to the map of the Internet, of the Storm network:



Each white dot depicts a /24 network in which at least one IP address is infected with Storm Worm. The picture shows that the distribution of the malware is scattered, with some netblock clearly dominating. These netblocks are usually dial-up networks from the US.

Call for Paper: 1st Workshop on Large-scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET '08)

Monday, November 5. 2007
The Call for Papers for the First USENIX Workshop on Large-scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET '08) is available since a couple of days. I am very proud to be one of the members of the program committee and hope that some readers of this blog also submit a paper to the workshop. LEET '08 will focus on the underlying mechanisms used to compromise and control hosts, the large-scale "applications" being perpetrated upon this framework, and the social and economic networks driving these threats.

Important dates:
  • Paper submissions due: February 11, 2008, 11:59 p.m. EST

  • Notification to authors: March 24, 2008

  • Final papers due: April 4, 2008

  • Workshop: April 15, 2008 - San Francisco, CA, USA

The workshop will be will be co-located with the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI '08), which will take place April 16–18, 2008, and Usability, Psychology, and Security 2008, which will take place on April 14, 2008.

Overview:
As the Internet has become a universal mechanism for commerce and communication, it has also become an attractive medium for online criminal enterprise. Today, widespread vulnerabilities in both software and user behavior allow miscreants to compromise millions of hosts (worms, viruses, drive-by exploits, etc.), conceal their activities with sophisticated system software (rootkits), and manage these resources via a distributed command and control framework (botnets). This platform in turn provides economics of scale for a wide range of criminal activities including spam, phishing, DDoS, click fraud, and so on.


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