A research team lead by Prof. Kevin Almeroth, Christopher Kruegel, and
Giovanni Vigna, at the University of California at Santa Barbara hijacked
the Mebroot botnet for about a month and used it to study drive-by
downloading. Drive-by downloading involves hacking into a legitimate site
to covertly install malicious software on visitors’ machines or redirect
them to another site.

Prof. Christopher Kruegel and Prof. Xifeng Yan are the first scholars appointed to
the Eugene Aas Endowed Chair and the Venkatesh Narayanamurti Endowed Chair
in Computer Science. A special inaugural celebration will be held October
22, 2009. Details are available on our Endowed Chairs webpage.

To deal with the complexities of modern software, computer scientists are
increasingly reliant on special software tools such as data-race detectors,
memory bounds checkers, and data flight recorders. However, these tools can
make the programs being tested run hundreds to thousands of times slower
than normal. In their paper on “Quantifying the Potential for Program
Analysis Peripherals”, UCSB students Mohit Tiwari and Shashidhar Mysore,
along with their advisor Professor Tim Sherwood, show that significant

The Department of Computer Science is sponsoring the Fourth Annual Computer
Science Graduate Student Workshop on Computing. The focus of this workshop
is to highlight top student research within the department, promote the
exchange of ideas among students, faculty and industry, and familiarize new
graduate students with the research conducted within our department and the
larger computer science community. Top research papers from graduate
students will be presented as fifteen minute talks. The workshop will also