Today, the ability to monetize customers’ visits from the click of a single link entices companies to take part in spam-based advertising, filling people’s inboxes with billions of messages every day and engendering widespread antipathy. But fear not, this business has also given rise to a multi-billion dollar anti-spam industry. To combat the growth of spam-based advertising, UC San Diego computer scientists have presented a holistic analysis of the spam value chain in “Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain”. Their findings offer evidence that there may be a truly effective intervention through public policy action in Western countries.
And this is just the beginning. According to Stefan Savage, the research conducted by him and his team has “kicked up a half-dozen other projects… including several papers to appear [which appeared] at CSET ’11 [15] and USENIX Security ’11 [16].” Recently, Savage has also been elected to the American Academy of the Arts for his research and accomplishments in cybersecurity.
Press
- NY Times “Study Sees Way to Win Spam Fight”
- “Interview with Stefan Savage On the Spam Payment Trail” by Rik Farrow
- Madisonian “S is for Security; S is for Spam; S is for Stefan Savage”
Project Details
- UC San Diego Researchers: Kirill Levchenko, Andreas Pitsillidis, Neha Chachra, Brandon Enright, Tristan Havlorson, Chris Kanic, He Liu, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage
- Other Researchers: Márk Félegyházi, Chris Grier, Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver, Vern Paxson
- Conference: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May 2011