Manos Antonakakis

Bharat Srinivasan, Athanasios Kountouras, Najmeh Miramirkhani et al.

Technical Support Scams (TSS), which combine online abuse with social engineering over the phone channel, have persisted despite several law enforcement actions. The tactics used by these scammers have evolved over time and they have targeted an ever increasing number of technology brands. Although recent research has provided insights into TSS, these scams have now evolved to exploit ubiquitously used online services such as search and sponsored advertisements served in response to search queries. We use a data-driven approach to understand search-and-ad abuse by TSS to gain visibility into the online infrastructure that facilitates it. By carefully formulating tech support queries with multiple search engines, we collect data about both the support infrastructure and the websites to which TSS victims are directed when they search online for tech support resources. We augment this with a DNS-based amplification technique to further enhance visibility into this abuse infrastructure. By analyzing the collected data, we demonstrate that tech support scammers are (1) successful in getting major as well as custom search engines to return links to websites controlled by them, and (2) they are able to get ad networks to serve malicious advertisements that lead to scam pages. Our study period of 8 months uncovered over 9,000 TSS domains, of both passive and aggressive types, with minimal overlap between sets that are reached via organic search results and sponsored ads. Also, we found over 2,400 support domains which aid the TSS domains in manipulating organic search results. Moreover, we found little overlap with domains that are reached via abuse of domain parking and URL-shortening services which was investigated previously. Thus, investigation of search-and-ad abuse provides new insights into TSS tactics and helps detect previously unknown abuse infrastructure that facilitates these scams.

Yizheng Chen, Yacin Nadji, Athanasios Kountouras et al.

Graph modeling allows numerous security problems to be tackled in a general way, however, little work has been done to understand their ability to withstand adversarial attacks. We design and evaluate two novel graph attacks against a state-of-the-art network-level, graph-based detection system. Our work highlights areas in adversarial machine learning that have not yet been addressed, specifically: graph-based clustering techniques, and a global feature space where realistic attackers without perfect knowledge must be accounted for (by the defenders) in order to be practical. Even though less informed attackers can evade graph clustering with low cost, we show that some practical defenses are possible.

Panagiotis Kintis, Najmeh Miramirkhani, Charles Lever et al.

Domain squatting is a common adversarial practice where attackers register domain names that are purposefully similar to popular domains. In this work, we study a specific type of domain squatting called "combosquatting," in which attackers register domains that combine a popular trademark with one or more phrases (e.g., betterfacebook[.]com, youtube-live[.]com). We perform the first large-scale, empirical study of combosquatting by analyzing more than 468 billion DNS records---collected from passive and active DNS data sources over almost six years. We find that almost 60% of abusive combosquatting domains live for more than 1,000 days, and even worse, we observe increased activity associated with combosquatting year over year. Moreover, we show that combosquatting is used to perform a spectrum of different types of abuse including phishing, social engineering, affiliate abuse, trademark abuse, and even advanced persistent threats. Our results suggest that combosquatting is a real problem that requires increased scrutiny by the security community.