CircleID

A project named S-GPS or Spammer Global Positioning System, by Microsoft researchers uses spammer identification rather than spam identification to identify zombie-based spammers. Researchers from the project report: "Large-scale online services such as email and instant messaging are popular targets for attackers, who sign up for new accounts and compromise legitimate user accounts in order to propagate spam emails, phishing links, or malware.

To counter such attacks, this project focuses on exploring social connections among users that are difficult for attackers to mimic. The research explores a wide range of graph properties to differentiate legitimate human users from tens of millions of maliciously created accounts and hijacked accounts."

Social Graphs for Online Service Security – a sampled user email-connectivity graph. (Source: Microsoft Research)

Related topics: Cyberattack, Cybercrime, Malware, Security, Spam