News

Malware Distributors Pay to Install Malware

July 18, 2011
Networking Group researchers have found that the majority of the most active malware distributors pay third parties to install their malicious software on at least some of the computers they infect. The study, featured in the MIT Technology Review, describes how researchers infiltrated four "pay-per-install" providers and downloaded over a million instances of malware. They found that twelve of the 20 families of malware distributors seen most frequently use "pay-per-install" providers to infect machines.

Netalyzer Recommended by the Internet Society

June 8, 2011
ICSI's Netalyzr system is one of four end-user tests recommended by the Internet Society to see what problems users may encounter with IPv6, the new Internet Protocol address standard that will eventually replace the protocol used by most Internet services today. Netalyzr also tests whether a user's Internet service provider is interfering with network traffic.

Read more about IPv6 here >>

Test your Internet connection with Netalyzr here >>

Speech Group Students Receive Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships

June 1, 2011
Two PhD students in the ICSI Speech Group have received a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship to pursue their work on a system that automatically summarizes large amounts of text. Mohit Bansal and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick will receive $50,000 each in the coming year and will collaborate with Qualcomm research and development throughout the year.

Paper by ICSI Staff and Alumni Receives SIGCOMM Test of Time Award

May 31, 2011
The ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award has been given for a 2001 paper on scalable content-addressable networks written by Networking Group researchers. The award recognizes papers that continue to be useful contributions to the field a decade after publication.

ICSI Researchers Work with Secure Computing Center at UCB

May 30, 2011
Several ICSI researchers will participate in the recently announced Intel Science and Technology Center for Secure Computing at UC Berkeley. Networking Group leader Scott Shenker, Vern Paxson, who leads security efforts at ICSI, and external fellow Sylvia Ratnasamy will join researchers from across the US in exploring ways to guard personal computers from malware, secure mobile devices that use third-party applications, and protect personal data on the Internet. The center will receive $2.5 million per year in funding from Intel.

Spam Study by Networking Group Featured in New York Times

May 20, 2011
In a study featured in the New York Times, ICSI, UC Berkeley, and UC San Diego researchers found that just three banks authorize 95 percent of credit card sales of goods advertised through spam. The study measured the spam-based business cycle from the sending of unwanted email to the delivery of goods

Vern Paxson Wins ACM SIGCOMM Award

May 16, 2011
The 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Award has been awarded to Vern Paxson, a senior researcher in the Networking Group. Paxson is recognized for his seminal contributions to Internet measurement and security, as well as for distinguished leadership and service to the Internet community. Past winners of the award include Scott Shenker, who leads the Networking Group, Sally Floyd, a senior researcher in the group, and Domenico Ferrari, a former deputy director of ICSI and Networking Group leader. More >>

Paul Kay Published in PNAS

April 28, 2011
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published a study by AI researcher Paul Kay that shows that learning new color names causes rapid growth in grey matter in the adult brain. Kay and his collaborators from Beijing and Hong Kong found that when adults learned new subcategories of green and blue, the part of the brain responsible for color vision grew rapidly. The article is Kay's tenth in PNAS in the last several years. Read the article here >>

Press for Study on Profitability of Spam

March 17, 2011
U.S. News and World Report, Wired Magazine and the NPR News Blog have featured research by Networking Group members and a team from UC San Diego on the profitability of spam. The researchers took over part of a spam botnet, a group of malware-infected computers instructed to send large amounts of spam, to find out how many spam messages were successfully delivered and how many led to a sale. Read more about the research here >>

ICSI Alum Wins Best Paper Award

March 10, 2011
Speech Group alum Eric Fosler-Lussier, along with Dr. Jeremy Morris of Ohio State University, has won a 2010 best paper award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. They were one of six teams recognized for the exceptional merit of their papers. Fosler-Lussier was a graduate student under Speech Group leader Nelson Morgan and later a postdoctoral researcher at ICSI. Read more about the award here >>

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