Today I read a paper titled “Analyzing the Social Structure and Dynamics of E-mail and Spam in Massive Backbone Internet Traffic”
The abstract is:
E-mail is probably the most popular application on the Internet, with everyday business and personal communications dependent on it
Spam or unsolicited e-mail has been estimated to cost businesses significant amounts of money
However, our understanding of the network-level behavior of legitimate e-mail traffic and how it differs from spam traffic is limited
In this study, we have passively captured SMTP packets from a 10 Gbit/s Internet backbone link to construct a social network of e-mail users based on their exchanged e-mails
The focus of this paper is on the graph metrics indicating various structural properties of e-mail networks and how they evolve over time
This study also looks into the differences in the structural and temporal characteristics of spam and non-spam networks
Our analysis on the collected data allows us to show several differences between the behavior of spam and legitimate e-mail traffic, which can help us to understand the behavior of spammers and give us the knowledge to statistically model spam traffic on the network-level in order to complement current spam detection techniques