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The computer security group at the University of California, Santa Barbara
has been actively working on improving the safety and security of the
Internet. Two of their research projects have made recent news headlines.

Researchers led by Brett Stone-Gross, developed a system to detect
persistently bad Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The goal is to publicly
expose ISPs that are negligent or blatantly lax in maintaining the security
and integrity of their networks. The system known as FIRE tracks botnet
command-and-control, phishing, drive-by-download exploit, and malware
servers and maps them back to the hosting providers. The researchers then
assign a reputation score that is computed based on a network’s aggregate
malicious activities, in comparison with the network’s overall size. The
results are displayed on a web-based service at http://maliciousnetworks.org
.

Another project, carried out by Gianluca Stringhini, analyzed spam on social
networks. The increasing popularity of these sites attracts malicious users,
that leverage hacked accounts or ad-hoc profiles to deliver spam or
malicious links to their victims. The project showed that spammers have very
distinct behavior, which makes it possible to detect them among the crowd of
legitimate users. These observations were applied to the Twitter social
network, through a system able to detect spammers on that platform. The
system is based on two components, a crawling part that searches the social
network for spam accounts, and a Twitter profile (
http://twitter.com/spamdetector) to which users can flag spammer profiles.

References:
http://www.krebsonsecurity.com/2010/03/naming-and-shaming-bad-isps/
http://securitywatch.eweek.com/twitter/free_twitter_anti-spam_service_launched.html
http://www.darkreading.com/securityservices/security/client/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223900274