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Fighting Spam, Phishing and Online Scams at the Network Level

Fighting Spam, Phishing and Online Scams at the Network Level. Nick Feamster Georgia Tech. with Anirudh Ramachandran, Shuang Hao, Nadeem Syed, Alex Gray, Sven Krasser, Santosh Vempala. Spam: More than Just a Nuisance. 95% of all email traffic Image and PDF Spam (PDF spam ~12%)

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Fighting Spam, Phishing and Online Scams at the Network Level

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  1. Fighting Spam, Phishing and Online Scams at the Network Level Nick FeamsterGeorgia Tech with Anirudh Ramachandran, Shuang Hao, Nadeem Syed, Alex Gray, Sven Krasser, Santosh Vempala

  2. Spam: More than Just a Nuisance • 95% of all email traffic • Image and PDF Spam (PDF spam ~12%) • As of August 2007, one in every 87 emails constituted a phishing attack • Targeted attacks on the rise • 20k-30k unique phishing attacks per month Source: CNET (January 2008), APWG

  3. Filtering • Prevent unwanted traffic from reaching a user’s inbox by distinguishing spam from ham • Question: What features best differentiate spam from legitimate mail? • Content-based filtering: What is in the mail? • IP address of sender: Who is the sender? • Behavioral features: How the mail is sent?

  4. Conventional Approach: Content Filters • Trying to hit a moving target... Images PDFs Excel sheets ...and even mp3s!

  5. Problems with Content Filtering • Low cost to evasion:Spammers can easily alter features of an email’s content can be easily adjusted and changed • Customized emails are easy to generate: Content-based filters need fuzzy hashes over content, etc. • High cost to filter maintainers: Filters must be continually updated as content-changing techniques become more sophisticated

  6. Another Approach: IP Addresses • Problem: IP addresses are ephemeral • Every day, 10% of senders are from previously unseen IP addresses • Possible causes • Dynamic addressing • New infections

  7. Idea: Network-Based Filtering • Filter email based on how it is sent, in addition to simply what is sent. • Network-level properties are less malleable • Set of target recipients • Hosting or upstream ISP (AS number) • Membership in a botnet (spammer, hosting infrastructure) • Network location of sender and receiver

  8. Challenges • Understanding the network-level behavior • What behaviors do spammers have? • How well do existing techniques work? • Building classifiers using network-level features • Key challenge: Which features to use? • Algorithms: SpamTracker and SNARE • Building the system • Dynamism: Behavior itself can change • Scale: Lots of email messages (and spam!) out there

  9. Data Collection: Spam and BGP • Spam Traps: Domains that receive only spam • BGP Monitors: Watch network-level reachability Domain 1 Domain 2 17-Month Study: August 2004 to December 2005

  10. Data Collection: MailAvenger • Highly configurable SMTP server • Collects many useful statistics

  11. ~ 10 minutes BGP “Spectrum Agility” • Hijack IP address space using BGP • Send spam • Withdraw IP address A small club of persistent players appears to be using this technique. Common short-lived prefixes and ASes 61.0.0.0/8 4678 66.0.0.0/8 21562 82.0.0.0/8 8717 Somewhere between 1-10% of all spam (some clearly intentional, others might be flapping)

  12. Why Such Big Prefixes? • Visibility: Route typically won’t be filtered (nice and short) • Flexibility:Client IPs can be scattered throughout dark space within a large /8 • Same sender usually returns with different IP addresses

  13. Characteristics of Agile Senders • IP addresses are widely distributed across the /8 space • IP addresses typically appear only once at our sinkhole • Depending on which /8, 60-80% of these IP addresses were not reachable by traceroute when we spot-checked • Some IP addresses were in allocated, albeit unannounced space • Some AS paths associated with the routes contained reserved AS numbers

  14. Other Findings • Top senders: Korea, China, Japan • Still about 40% of spam coming from U.S. • More than half of sender IP addresses appear less than twice • ~90% of spam sent to traps from Windows

  15. What about IP-based blacklists?

  16. Two Metrics • Completeness: The fraction of spamming IP addresses that are listed in the blacklist • Responsiveness: The time for the blacklist to list the IP address after the first occurrence of spam

  17. Completeness and Responsiveness • 10-35% of spam is unlisted at the time of receipt • 8.5-20% of these IP addresses remain unlisted even after one month Data: Trap data from March 2007, Spamhaus from March and April 2007

  18. Completeness of IP Blacklists ~95% of bots listed in one or more blacklists Fraction of all spam received ~80% listed on average Only about half of the IPs spamming from short-lived BGP are listed in any blacklist Number of DNSBLs listing this spammer Spam from IP-agile senders tend to be listed in fewer blacklists

  19. What’s Wrong with IP Blacklists? • Based on ephemeral identifier (IP address) • More than 10% of all spam comes from IP addresses not seen within the past two months • Dynamic renumbering of IP addresses • Stealing of IP addresses and IP address space • Compromised machines • IP addresses of senders have considerable churn • Often require a human to notice/validate the behavior • Spamming is compartmentalized by domain and not analyzed across domains

  20. Ephemeral: Addresses Keep Changing About 10% of IP addresses never seen before in trace Fraction of IP Addresses

  21. Low Volume to Each Domain Most spammers send very little spam, regardless of how long they have been spamming. Amount of Spam Lifetime (seconds)

  22. Where do we go from here? • Option 1: Stronger sender identity • Stronger sender identity/authentication may make reputation systems more effective • May require changes to hosts, routers, etc. • Option 2: Filtering based on sender behavior • Can be done on today’s network • Identifying features may be tricky, and some may require network-wide monitoring capabilities

  23. Outline • Understanding the network-level behavior • What behaviors do spammers have? • How well do existing techniques work? • Building classifiers using network-level features • Key challenge: Which features to use? • Algorithms: SpamTracker and SNARE • Building the system (SpamSpotter) • Dynamism: Behavior itself can change • Scale: Lots of email messages (and spam!) out there

  24. SpamTracker • Idea:Blacklist sending behavior (“Behavioral Blacklisting”) • Identify sending patterns commonly used by spammers • Intuition:Much more difficult for a spammer to change the technique by which mail is sent than it is to change the content

  25. SpamTracker Approach • Construct a behavioral fingerprint for each sender • Cluster senders with similar fingerprints • Filter new senders that map to existing clusters

  26. DHCP Reassignment Some Patterns of Sending are Invariant IP Address: 76.17.114.xxx IP Address: 24.99.146.xxx • Spammer's sending pattern has not changed • IP Blacklists cannot make this connection spam spam spam spam spam spam domain3.com domain3.com domain1.com domain2.com domain1.com domain2.com

  27. DHCP Reassignment Infection SpamTracker: Identify Invariant IP Address: 24.99.146.xxx Unknown sender IP Address: 76.17.114.xxx Known Spammer spam spam spam spam spam spam domain3.com domain1.com domain2.com domain3.com domain1.com domain2.com Cluster on sending behavior Cluster on sending behavior Similar fingerprint! Behavioral fingerprint

  28. Building the Classifier: Clustering • Feature: Distribution of email sending volumes across recipient domains • Clustering Approach • Build initial seed list of bad IP addresses • For each IP address, compute feature vector: volume per domain per time interval • Collapse into a single IP x domain matrix: • Compute clusters

  29. Clustering: Output and Fingerprint • For each cluster, compute fingerprint vector: • New IPs will be compared to this “fingerprint” IP x IP Matrix: Intensity indicates pairwise similarity

  30. Classifying IP Addresses • Given “new” IP address, build a feature vector based on its sending pattern across domains • Compute the similarity of this sending pattern to that of each known spam cluster • Normalized dot product of the two feature vectors • Spam score is maximum similarity to any cluster

  31. Evaluation • Emulate the performance of a system that could observe sending patterns across many domains • Build clusters/train on given time interval • Evaluate classification • Relative to labeled logs • Relative to IP addresses that were eventually listed

  32. Data • 30 days of Postfix logs from email hosting service • Time, remote IP, receiving domain, accept/reject • Allows us to observe sending behavior over a large number of domains • Problem: About 15% of accepted mail is also spam • Creates problems with validating SpamTracker • 30 days of SpamHaus database in the month following the Postfix logs • Allows us to determine whether SpamTracker detects some sending IPs earlier than SpamHaus

  33. Classification Results Ham Spam Not always so accurate! SpamTracker Score

  34. Early Detection Results • Compare SpamTracker scores on “accepted” mail to the SpamHaus database • About 15% of accepted mail was later determined to be spam • Can SpamTracker catch this? • Of 620 emails that were accepted, but sent from IPs that were blacklisted within one month • 65 emails had a score larger than 5 (85th percentile)

  35. Evasion • Problem: Malicious senders could add noise • Solution: Use smaller number of trusted domains • Problem: Malicious senders could change sending behavior to emulate “normal” senders • Need a more robust set of features…

  36. Improving Classification • Lower overhead • Faster detection • Better robustness (i.e., to evasion, dynamism) • Use additional features and combine for more robust classification • Temporal: interarrival times, diurnal patterns • Spatial: sending patterns of groups of senders

  37. Outline • Understanding the network-level behavior • What behaviors do spammers have? • How well do existing techniques work? • Building classifiers using network-level features • Key challenge: Which features to use? • Algorithms: SpamTracker and SNARE • Building the system (SpamSpotter) • Dynamism: Behavior itself can change • Scale: Lots of email messages (and spam!) out there

  38. SNARE: Automated Sender Reputation • Goal: Sender reputation from a single packet?(or at least as little information as possible) • Lower overhead • Faster classification • Less malleable • Key challenge • What features satisfy these properties and can distinguish spammers from legitimate senders

  39. Sender-Receiver Geodesic Distance 90% of legitimate messages travel 2,200 miles or less

  40. Density of Senders in IP Space For spammers, k nearest senders are much closer in IP space

  41. Combining Features • Put features into the RuleFit classifier • 10-fold cross validation on one day of query logs from a large spam filtering appliance provider • Using only network-level features • Completely automated

  42. Outline • Understanding the network-level behavior • What behaviors do spammers have? • How well do existing techniques work? • Building classifiers using network-level features • Key challenge: Which features to use? • Algorithms: SpamTracker and SNARE • Building the system (SpamSpotter) • Dynamism: Behavior itself can change • Scale: Lots of email messages (and spam!) out there

  43. Real-Time Blacklist Deployment • As mail arrives, lookups received at BL • Queries provide proxy for sending behavior • Train based on received data • Return score Approach

  44. Challenges • Scalability: How to collect and aggregate data, and form the signatures without imposing too much overhead? • Dynamism: When to retrain the classifier, given that sender behavior changes? • Reliability: How should the system be replicated to better defend against attack or failure? • Sensor placement: Where should monitors be placed to best observe behavior/construct features?

  45. Design Choice: Augment DNSBL • Expressive queries • SpamHaus: $ dig 55.102.90.62.zen.spamhaus.org • Ans: 127.0.0.3 (=> listed in exploits block list)‏ • SpamSpotter: $ dig \ receiver_ip.receiver_domain.sender_ip.rbl.gtnoise.net • e.g., dig 120.1.2.3.gmail.com.-.1.1.207.130.rbl.gtnoise.net • Ans: 127.1.3.97 (SpamSpotter score = -3.97)‏ • Also a source of data • Unsupervised algorithms work with unlabeled data

  46. Design Choice: Sampling Relatively small samples can achieve low false positive rates

  47. Sampling: Training Time

  48. Dynamism: Accuracy over Time

  49. Improvements • Accuracy • Synthesizing multiple classifiers • Incorporating user feedback • Learning algorithms with bounded false positives • Performance • Caching/Sharing • Streaming • Security • Learning in adversarial environments

  50. Summary: Network-Based Behavioral Filtering • Spam increasing, spammers becoming agile • Content filters are falling behind • IP-Based blacklists are evadable • Up to 30% of spam not listed in common blacklists at receipt. ~20% remains unlisted after a month • Complementary approach: behavioral blacklisting based on network-level features • Blacklist based on how messages are sent • SpamTracker: Spectral clustering • catches significant amounts faster than existing blacklists • SNARE: Automated sender reputation • ~90% accuracy of existing with lightweight features • SpamSpotter: Putting it together in an RBL system

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