VB2014 paper: Labelling spam through the analysis of protocol patterns

Posted by   Virus Bulletin on   Nov 26, 2014

What do your IP packet sizes say about whether you're a spammer?

Over the next few months, we will be sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added 'Labelling spam through the analysis of protocol patterns' by Bitdefender researchers Andrei Husanu and Alexandru Trifan.

Machines sending spam tend to behave differently in a number of ways from those sending legitimate emails. One of the ways people have long been fighting spam is to detect this difference, for instance by fingerprinting the TCP/IP connection to determine the operating system, or to check whether the sender starts 'talking SMTP' before the spam filter has sent the SMTP banner.

In their VB2014 paper, Andrei Husanu and Alexandru Trifan suggest a different way to distinguish spammers from legitimate emailers: they looked at the IP packet sizes of SMTP connections and found some behaviour that was typical of spammers trying to send a variation of the same message to as many recipients as possible, or of spam sent from a (likely compromised) mobile device.

  Fluctuating packet sizes are typical of email sent over a mobile connection.

You can read the paper here in HTML-format, or download it here as a PDF (no registration or subscription required). You can download the presentation slides here. We have also uploaded the presentation to our YouTube channel.

We apologise for the poor quality of the screen capture in the video. We will try to upload a better version at a later stage.

Posted on 26 November 2014 by Martijn Grooten

twitter.png
fb.png
linkedin.png
hackernews.png
reddit.png

 

Latest posts:

In memoriam: Dr Alan Solomon

We were very sorry to learn of the passing of industry pioneer Dr Alan Solomon earlier this week.

New paper: Nexus Android banking botnet – compromising C&C panels and dissecting mobile AppInjects

In a new paper, researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Bansal provide details of a security vulnerability in the Nexus Android botnet C&C panel that was exploited in order to gather threat intelligence, and present a model of mobile AppInjects.

New paper: Collector-stealer: a Russian origin credential and information extractor

In a new paper, F5 researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Chaturvedi present a 360 analysis of Collector-stealer, a Russian-origin credential and information extractor.

VB2021 localhost videos available on YouTube

VB has made all VB2021 localhost presentations available on the VB YouTube channel, so you can now watch - and share - any part of the conference freely and without registration.

VB2021 localhost is over, but the content is still available to view!

VB2021 localhost - VB's second virtual conference - took place last week, but you can still watch all the presentations.

We have placed cookies on your device in order to improve the functionality of this site, as outlined in our cookies policy. However, you may delete and block all cookies from this site and your use of the site will be unaffected. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to Virus Bulletin's use of data as outlined in our privacy policy.