In this talk, we highlight several ways that hackers exploit the web and social media to propagate malware, infect users, and compromise computers. We also present the efforts of our group to measure, detect and stop these activities. Specifically, we discuss our work on (a) studying spam and its supporting infrastructure, (b) detecting malicious websites, and (c) identifying typosquatting sites, an interesting parasitic behavior.
Then we show how we transitioned some of these technologies into our startup StopTheHacker.com which got sold in Oct 2013 and discuss our experience from this effort.
Michalis Faloutsos is a faculty member at the Computer Science Dept. at the University of New Mexico. He got his bachelor's degree at the National Technical University of Athens and his M.Sc and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. His interests include, Internet protocols and measurements, peer-to-peer networks, network security, BGP routing, and ad-hoc networks. With his two brothers, he co-authored the paper on power-laws of the Internet topology, which received the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time award. His work has been supported by many NSF and military grants, for a cumulative total of more than $6 million. Several recent works have been widely cited in popular printed and electronic press such as slashdot, ACM Electronic News, USA Today, and Wired. Most recently he has focused on the classification of traffic and web-security, and co-founded a cyber-security company founded in 2008, offering services as www.stopthehacker.com, which received two SBIR grants from the National Science Foundation, and got acquired in Oct 2013.
