The abuse sharing economy: Understanding the limits of threat exchanges

Kurt Thomas, Rony Amira, Adi Ben-Yoash, Ori Folger, Amir Hardon, Ari Berger, Elie Bursztein, Michael Bailey

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The underground commoditization of compromised hosts suggests a tacit capability where miscreants leverage the same machine— subscribed by multiple criminal ventures—to simultaneously profit from spam, fake account registration, malicious hosting, and other forms of automated abuse. To expedite the detection of these commonly abusive hosts, there are now multiple industry-wide efforts that aggregate abuse reports into centralized threat exchanges. In this work, we investigate the potential benefit of global reputation tracking and the pitfalls therein.We develop our findings from a snapshot of 45 million IP addresses abusing six Google services including Gmail, YouTube, and ReCaptcha between April 7–April 21, 2015. We estimate the scale of end hosts controlled by attackers, expose underground biases that skew the abuse perspectives of individual web services, and examine the frequency that criminals re-use the same infrastructure to attack multiple, heterogeneous services. Our results indicate that an average Google service can block 14% of abusive traffic based on threats aggregated from seemingly unrelated services, though we demonstrate that outright blacklisting incurs an untenable volume of false positives.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationResearch in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses - 19th International Symposium, RAID 2016, Proceedings
EditorsMarc Dacier, Fabian Monrose, Gregory Blanc, Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro
PublisherSpringer
Pages143-164
Number of pages22
ISBN (Print)9783319457185
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016
Event19th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses, RAID 2016 - Paris, France
Duration: Sep 19 2016Sep 21 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9854 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other19th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses, RAID 2016
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityParis
Period9/19/169/21/16

Keywords

  • Reputation systems
  • Threat exchanges
  • Underground specialization

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

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