Author: Deeptiman Jugessur

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Deeptiman Jugessur

Deeptiman Jugessur is a scientific programmer specializing in pattern recognition. He is developing an expertise in spam recognition from both a textual and behavioral context. But don’t let the brainiac description fool you: he’s a world traveler with a keen sense of humor and some impressive Jiu-Jitsu moves. Take that spam!

Articles by this author

Hacking Facebook: A Socialbot Infiltrating Approach

Last week I read a fascinating yet terrifying paper on the natural evolution of bots. The paper is called “The Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialize for Fame and Money” by Boshmaf et al. Bots in the email security world have been around for a while and are used primarily for spamming. Socialbots are programs that mimic humans and infiltrate social networks to farm for personal data. The paper is a great read on how the authors engineered a Socialbot network and released it on Facebook. (Nov 16, 2011)

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What’s hiding in the Cloud?

Around 2 years ago, Richard Stallman called cloud computing a trap and said it was worse than stupidity. For those of you who do not know Richard Stallman, he’s the founder of the GNU project and the pioneer of the GNU Public License, an unrivalled genius in the programming world and a holder of 8 honorary doctorates! (May 26, 2011)

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WHOIS Woes

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a project where I needed to determine the creation dates of various domains. Little did I know about the complexities involved in achieving such an apparently simple task. After all, ICANN has a WHOIS Data Reminder Policy (WDRP), thus all domains must have this information readily available via a simple WHOIS query. (Oct 25, 2010)

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Organized Cybercrime

A month ago I read a fascinating book called McMafia 1by Misha Glenny 2. Glenny, a former BBC world correspondent, presents a terrifying yet eye opening look at how organized crime has progressed with Globalization over the last few decades. Glenny covers all the major illicit activities from global drug trafficking networks, to prostitution and human trafficking. One chapter in particular is dedicated to the future of organized crime and the fastest growing sector, cybercrime. (Jul 13, 2010)

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Anti-Social Networking

Web 2.0 is leading us to operate and collaborate more through our web browsers than ever before. Consequently, sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace are being used more aggressively for everything from chatting to marketing. Spammers are loving this. (Apr 07, 2010)

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Botnet Generated Spam

Botnets are networks of compromised machines that are under the command and control (C&C) of one entity - the botnet master. They are typically used for crimes such as denial-of-service attacks, identity thefts, phishing and, most commonly, for sending spam. Current botnets have easy-to-use HTML-based interfaces and can be rented out by spammers for their various spamming campaigns. Researchers reported that during 2008, 85% of spam was generated by six botnets (Mega-D, Srizibi, Storm, Rustock, Pushdo and Cutwail). (Nov 06, 2009)

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