Email Worm Mitigation by Controlling the Name Server Response Rate

Email worms and the spam associated with them are one of the main operational security issues today because they waste time, money and resources. The high incidence of email worms today clearly indicates that current network defence mechanisms yield rather meagre results in mitigating this class of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2008 Second International Conference on Emerging Security Information, Systems and Technologies pp. 139 - 145
Main Authors Chatzis, N., Pujol, E.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.08.2008
Subjects
Aggregates
DNS
Electronic mail
email worms
Grippers
Internet
Limiting
rate limiting
Security
Servers
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Summary:Email worms and the spam associated with them are one of the main operational security issues today because they waste time, money and resources. The high incidence of email worms today clearly indicates that current network defence mechanisms yield rather meagre results in mitigating this class of self-propagating malicious program. In this work, we build on the observation that email worms rely on the local name servers to propagate, and propose a novel approach to slow down their propagation by means of limiting the response rate of local name servers, which are topologically near the infected user machines. We conduct extensive simulation experiments that involve email network, email user behaviour, email propagation, and physical network modelling, and show that our approach is promising for slowing down email worm epidemics.
ISSN:2162-2108
DOI:10.1109/SECURWARE.2008.46