Channels ▼   Fighting Back Against Spam-Zombie Hordes
Researchers at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, have been
pursuing a different approach to combating spam-spewing zombie
botnets. Instead of focusing on identifying spam in a network
and then trying to filter it out, they are out to identify the
sources of the spam based on IP-address properties.  "Today,
we're seeing a lot of network attacks from compromised zombie
hosts, often referred to as botnet hosts," Yinglian Xie
explains. "They're being used to launch and distribute denial-
of-service attacks, and they're notorious for launching large-
scale spam campaigns.  "We are trying to learn whether there's
some fundamental property that we might be able to leverage
across all these types of botnet attacks."  In seeking the
answers to such investigation, Xie and Fang Yu have devised the
approach of identifying and analyzing dynamic IP addresses to
examine what role they might play in detecting zombie-based
spamming servers.  Their findings are intriguing.