Mandarin Course

How to Steal a Botnet and What Can Happen When You Do

Google Tech Talk September 10, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Richard A. Kemmerer. Botnets, which are networks of malware-infected machines that are controlled by an adversary, are the root cause of a large number of security threats on the Internet. A particularly sophisticated and insidious type of bot is Torpig, which is a malware program that is designed to harvest sensitive information (such as bank account and credit card data) from its victims. In this talk, we report on our efforts to take control of the Torpig botnet for ten days. Over this period, we observed more than 180 thousand infections and recorded more than 70 GB of data that the bots collected. While botnets have been hijacked before, the Torpig botnet exhibits certain properties that make the analysis of the data particularly interesting. First, it is possible (with reasonable accuracy) to identify unique bot infections and relate that number to the more than 1.2 million IP addresses that contacted our command and control server during the ten day period. This shows that botnet estimates that are based on IP addresses are likely to report inflated numbers. Second, the Torpig botnet is large, targets a variety of applications, and gathers a rich and diverse set of information from the infected victims. This allowed us to perform interesting data analysis that goes well beyond simply counting the number of stolen credit cards. In this talk we will discuss the analysis that we performed on the data collected …

Situating Personal Information Management Practices within an Organization

Google Tech Talk December 4, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Manuel Pérez-Quiñones. Personal Information Management (PIM) practices are the behaviors that we follow when we organize our information. This often includes emails, documents, bookmarks, pictures, etc. Research in PIM has identified a common set of activities that require support: encountering information, organizing information, filing/archiving, and reusing information. Different tools must provide different kinds of support for each one of these activities. PIM practices become easier if the organization provides some infrastructure to alleviate the difficulty of these activities. But a larger value is that the organization can leverage these personal practices to improve the effectiveness of others and to capture that elusive corporate knowledge in an easy way. In this talk, I will describe previous work in PIM and highlight how some of the PIM practices can be supported and leveraged from the organization point of view. Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones is Associate Dean and Director of the Office for Graduate Recruiting and Diversity Initiatives at the Graduate School, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. Pérez-Quiñones holds a DSc in Computer Science from The George Washington University. His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal information management, user interface software, digital government …