Revealing social networks of spammers through spectral clustering

TL;DR

This paper uncovers social networks among spammers by analyzing harvesting behavior using spectral clustering, revealing new insights into spammer communities and their behaviors based on data from Project Honey Pot.

Contribution

It introduces a novel spectral clustering approach to identify communities of harvesters, revealing social structures and behavioral patterns among spammers.

Findings

Most spammers send only phishing or no phishing emails

Spammer communities also predominantly send only one type of email

Certain groups exhibit coherent temporal behavior and share IP addresses

Abstract

To date, most studies on spam have focused only on the spamming phase of the spam cycle and have ignored the harvesting phase, which consists of the mass acquisition of email addresses. It has been observed that spammers conceal their identity to a lesser degree in the harvesting phase, so it may be possible to gain new insights into spammers' behavior by studying the behavior of harvesters, which are individuals or bots that collect email addresses. In this paper, we reveal social networks of spammers by identifying communities of harvesters with high behavioral similarity using spectral clustering. The data analyzed was collected through Project Honey Pot, a distributed system for monitoring harvesting and spamming. Our main findings are (1) that most spammers either send only phishing emails or no phishing emails at all, (2) that most communities of spammers also send only phishing emails or no phishing emails at all, and (3) that several groups of spammers within communities exhibit coherent temporal behavior and have similar IP addresses. Our findings reveal some previously unknown behavior of spammers and suggest that there is indeed social structure between spammers to be discovered.