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Who Is Sending a Spam Email: Clustering and Characterizing Spamming Hosts

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Information Security and Cryptology -- ICISC 2013 (ICISC 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8565))

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Abstract

In this work, we propose a spam analyzing system that clusters the spamming hosts, characterizes and visualizes the spammers’ behaviors, and detects malicious clusters. The proposed system integrates behavior profiling in IP address level, IP address based clustering, characterizing spammer clusters, examining the maliciousness of embedded URLs, and deriving visual signatures for future detection of malicious spammers. We classify spamming hosts into botnet, worm, or individual spammers and derive their characteristics. We then design a clustering scheme to automatically classify the host IP addresses and to identify malicious groups according to known characteristics of each type of host. For rapid decision making in identifying botnets, we derive visual signatures using a parallel coordinates. We validate the proposed system using these spam email data collected by the spam trap system operated by the Korea Internet and Security Agency.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (NIPA-2013-H0301-13-1003) supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency). This research was supported by Korean Ministry of Environment as the Eco-Innovation project (Global Top project). (GT-SWS-11-02-007-3).

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Correspondence to Huy Kang Kim .

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 5. Statistics of important features according to host species

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Woo, J., Kang, H.J., Kang, A.R., Kwon, H., Kim, H.K. (2014). Who Is Sending a Spam Email: Clustering and Characterizing Spamming Hosts. In: Lee, HS., Han, DG. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology -- ICISC 2013. ICISC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8565. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12160-4_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12160-4_28

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-12159-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-12160-4

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