ICANN or ICANT: Is WHOIS an Enabler of Cybercrime?
- Authors: Watters, Paul , Herps, Aaron , Layton, Robert , McCombie, Stephen
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Proceedings - 4th Cybercrime and Trustworthy Computing Workshop, CTC 2013 p. 44-49
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: WHOIS acts as a registry for organisations or individuals who 'own' or take responsibility for domains. For any registry to be functional, its integrity needs to be assured. Unfortunately, WHOIS data does not appear to meet basic integrity requirements in many cases, reducing the effectiveness of law enforcement and rightsholders in requesting takedowns for phishing kits, zombie hosts that are part of a botnet, or infringing content. In this paper, we illustrate the problem using a case study from trademark protection, where investigators attempt to trace fake goods being advertised on Facebook. The results indicate that ICANN needs to at least introduce minimum verification standards for WHOIS records vis-Ã -vis integrity, and optimally, develop a system for rapid takedowns in the event that a domain is being misused.
Authorship attribution of IRC messages using inverse author frequency
- Authors: Layton, Robert , McCombie, Stephen , Watters, Paul
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings
- Full Text: false
- Description: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a useful and relativelysimple protocol for text based chat online, used in a variety ofareas online such as for discussion and technical support. IRC isalso used for cybercrime, with online rooms selling stolen creditcard details, botnet access and malware. The reasons for theuse of IRC in cybercrime include the widespread adoption andease of use, but also focus around the anonymity granted bythe protocol, allowing users to hide behind aliases that can bechanged regularly. In this research, we apply authorship analysistechniques to be able to attribute chat messages to known aliases.A preliminary experiment shows that this application is verydifficult, due to the short messages and repeated information.To improve the accuracy, we apply inverse-author-frequency(iaf) weighting, which gives higher weights to features used byfewer authors. This research is the first time that iaf has beenapplied to character n-gram models, previously being applied toword based models of authorship. We find that this improvesthe accuracy significantly for the RLP method and provides aplatform for successful applications of authorship analysis in thefuture. Overall, the method achieves accuracies of over 55% ina very difficult application domain. © 2012 IEEE.
- Description: 2003011051
Characterising and predicting cyber attacks using the Cyber Attacker Model Profile (CAMP)
- Authors: Watters, Paul , McCombie, Stephen , Layton, Robert , Pieprzyk, Josef
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Money Laundering Control Vol. 15, no. 4 (2012), p. 430-441
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Purpose – Ethnographic studies of cyber attacks typically aim to explain a particular profile of attackers in qualitative terms. The purpose of this paper is to formalise some of the approaches to build a Cyber Attacker Model Profile (CAMP) that can be used to characterise and predict cyber attacks. Design/methodology/approach – The paper builds a model using social and economic independent or predictive variables from several eastern European countries and benchmarks indicators of cybercrime within the Australian financial services system. Findings – The paper found a very strong link between perceived corruption and GDP in two distinct groups of countries – corruption in Russia was closely linked to the GDP of Belarus, Moldova and Russia, while corruption in Lithuania was linked to GDP in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine. At the same time corruption in Russia and Ukraine were also closely linked. These results support previous research that indicates a strong link between been legitimate economy and the black economy in many countries of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. The results of the regression analysis suggest that a highly skilled workforce which is mobile and working in an environment of high perceived corruption in the target countries is related to increases in cybercrime even within Australia. It is important to note that the data used for the dependent and independent variables were gathered over a seven year time period, which included large economic shocks such as the global financial crisis. Originality/value – This is the first paper to use a modelling approach to directly show the relationship between various social, economic and demographic factors in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, and the level of card skimming and card not present fraud in Australia. Acknowledgements: Paul A. Watters and Robert Layton are funded by IBM, Westpac, the State Government of Victoria and the Australian Federal Police.
- Description: 2003011112