Spam, Phishing, and the Looming Challenge of Big Botnets
Date
2007-05-17
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Abstract
What could a spammer or phisher do with a botnet of a thousand
machines? a hundred thousand? a million? Send lots of email is the least
worrisome answer to these questions. As anti-spam and anti-phishing defenses
improve, there is more than sufficient financial motivation for spammers and
phishers to consider what they can accomplish with enormous scale. We begin by
looking at a wide range of anti-spam defenses. Many of these, like rate
limiting and port 25 blocking, will simply no longer work against big botnets;
we explain why. Further, the basic cryptographic assumptions underlying the
implementation of SSL certificates and DomainKeys/DKIM need re-examination in
light of the massive computing power of big botnets. We describe possible
attacks by spammers and phishers, and the implications these attacks have in
terms of defense.
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Computer Science