usenix security symposium

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen spoke to an appreciative crowd at the USENIX Security Symposium this week in San Jose. The state’s top elections official earned a long round of applause from the techie crowd after her opening keynote, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Paper Ballot.” A [...]  read more »

At the USENIX Security Symposium in San Jose on Wednesday, a Google researcher presented a study on the pervasiveness of drive-by-downloads on the Internet, and the findings were unsettling, to say the least. Over a 10-month period last year, researchers analyzed 66 million URLs and detected more than 3 million that tried to automatically install [...]  read more »

At the Usenix Security Symposium in Boston Thursday morning, researcher Guofei Gu from the Georgia Institute of Technology unveiled a new application IT security pros can use to blunt the threat of bot infections.BotHunter is outlined in a paper Gu wrote with fellow Georgia Tech researcher Wenke Lee, and Phillip Porras, Vinod Yegneswaran and Martin [...]  read more »

As the effectiveness of online ads has continued to grow, so has the problem of click fraud. Criminals discovered some time ago that botnets make especially efficient means for perpetrating large-scale click fraud schemes, and they have been refining their techniques for years. Syndicators and online content publishers have yet to find an effective defense [...]  read more »