The Beauty of the Surrealistic Spam Art

Given the volume of spam representing over 50% of the world's email traffic, obviously to some it represents a huge sample to draw sadness or anger out of, and of course, visualize the findings. One man's spam is Alex Dragulescu's art :

"He doesn't use Photoshop but simply writes code to create computer art. For the Spam Plants, he parsed the data within junk e-mail--including subject lines, headers and footers--to detect relationships between that data. Then he visually represents those relationships. For example, the program draws on the numeric address of an e-mail sender and matches those numbers to a color chart, from 0 to 225. It needs three numbers to define a color, such as teal, so the program breaks down the IP address to three numbers so it can determine the color of the plant. The time a message is sent also plays a role. If it's sent in the early morning, the plant is smaller, or the time might stunt the plant's ability to grow, Dragulescu said. The size of the message might determine how bushy the plant is. Certain keywords, such as "Nigerian," might trigger more branches. But Dragulescu did not inject any irony. Messages about Viagra do not grow taller, for example."

I feel that now every spammer can pretend about being a stylish art admirer, with his spamming historical performance hanging on the wall, or perhaps it's my surrealistic black humor.

Related posts on spam and visualization :
Fighting Internet's email junk through licensing
An Over-performing Spammer
Consolidation, or Startups Popping out Like Mushrooms?
Dealing with Spam - The O'Reilly.com Way

Visualization, Intelligence and the Starlight project
Visualization in the Security and New Media world

Splitting a Botnet's Bandwidth Capacity

Metaphorically speaking, I always say that the masssess of end users' bandwidth is reaching that of a mid size ISP, while the lack of incentives or plain simple awarenss is resulting in today's easily assembled botnets. Freaky perspective, but that's what I perceive the trade-off out of this major economic boost given the improved connectivity France Telecom is about to offer to its customers in 2007/2008 - Fiber at Home with 2.5Gbits/s download, and 1.2Gbits/s upload. As it looks like, an end user is gonna be worth a hundred more infected ones in the near future.

More on malware.

Latest Report on Click Fraud

Google does have countless features, and it's not even considering to stop rolling new ones, but the secret to its huge market capitalization and revenue stream remains its advertising model fully utilizing the Long tail's concept. Therefore, click fraud remains the key issue to deal with, if they want to continue beating Wall Street's expectations. Last week Google released a commissioned report evaluating their anti click fraud methods, here's an excerpt on the four lines of defense :

"Google has built the following four 'lines of defense' for detecting invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages."

Despite Eric Schmidt's comments on click fraud as "self correcting" issue, Mark Cuban takes another perspective I find a very relevant one.The key remains the balance between Google's technologies and efforts to build awareness on the problem, very informative report. Pay-per-click is a powerful model forwarding the responsibility for eventual transactions to the advertiser's value added propostion, as compared to a Pay per action model. I doubt Google would have ever reached a stock split debate in its history if it were to use one.

Moreover, with the growing interest in a Pay-per-call model and the rise in voice phishing, it turns the trend into a hot one to keep an eye on for the upcoming future.

An Intergalactic Security Statement

Hell of a comment on the Malware Search Engine. Hackers crack secret Google malware search codes :

"Hidden malware search capabilities within Google which were reserved for antivirus and security research firms just weeks ago have been cracked by hackers, according to security industry sources. The key to finding malware in Google lies in having the signature for the specific malware program, according to researchers from enterprise IT security firm Secure Computing. However, the company reported that these previously hidden search capabilities have recently fallen into the hands of hackers. Why bother creating a new virus, worm or Trojan when you can simply find one and download it using Google? said Paul Henry, vice president of strategic accounts at Secure Computing. Unskilled hackers can use this previously unknown capability of Google to download malware and release it on the internet in targeted attacks as if they wrote it themselves."

Bothering to create a new piece of malware and ensuring its payload gets regularly updated to avoid AV detection is perhaps the most logical need compared to doing reconnaissance for known malware through Google. Looking for the signature means the piece of malware has already been detected somehow, somewhere, namely it's useless even to a script kiddie as I doubt one would do a favor to another, thus increasing the size of someone else's botnet. What you can actually use it for, is look for packed binary patterns, or known functions, and draw up better conclusions.

I really hope Secure Computing are more into harnessing the brand and product portfolio's power of CipherTrust, than they are into the dangers of known malware, not that there aren't exceptions of course!

Space wisdom courtesy of Doctor Fun.