Internet Censorship Revealed Through the Haze of Malware Pollution

March 28th, 2012 by Josh Polterock

We were happy to see the coverage of UCSD’s press release describing two papers we recently published, introducing new methods and applications for analyzing dark net data (aka “Internet background radiation” or IBR).  The first paper, “Analysis of Country-wide Internet Outages Caused by Censorship”, presented by author Alberto Dainotti last November at IMC 2011, focused on using IBR in conjunction with other data sources to reveal previously unreported aspects of the disruptions seen during the uprisings of early 2011 in Egypt and Libya. The second paper, “Extracting benefit from harm: using malware pollution to analyze the impact of political and geophysical events on the Internet”, published in ACM SIGCOMM CCR (January 12), used IBR data observed by UCSD’s network telescope to characterize Internet outages caused by natural disasters. In both cases the analysis of this (mostly malware-generated) background traffic contributed to our understanding of events unrelated to the malware itself. Our press release was picked up by several online publications, including The Wall Street Journal Blog, ACM TechnewsCommunications of the ACM Web siteSpacedailyPhysorgTom’s GuideProduct Design & DevelopmentNewswiseDomain-bEurekAlertEurasia reviewSecurity-today.comEverything San DiegoSpacewar Cyber War.

The papers are also available on CAIDA’s publications page.

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