Graduate student Jialong Zhang and Associate Professor Guofei Gu of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University received the Best Paper Award at the 35th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS).
The research paper, “Systematic Mining of Associated Server Herds for Malware Campaigning Discovery,” was recognized at the annual conference held in Columbus, Ohio. Out of 543 submissions, 70 were accepted to the conference. Zhang and Gu’s paper beat all submissions to be chosen as the top.
Zhang and Gu’s research focuses on cybersecurity. Their techniques find previously undetected malicious server groups and malware campaigns. Their prototype, Systematic Mining of Associated Server Herds (SMASH), monitors and traces groups of servers that may be working together in a malicious campaign.
Their research allows for a greater detection and prevention of malware campaigns. Cyber security analysts will no longer have to identify singular malicious domains, but will detect and eliminate multiple servers at one time.
“Criminals are using multiple servers to be more efficient in operation and more robust against security analysts,” Gu said. “We can leverage this insight to defend against them. Our SMASH system uncovers malicious servers through monitoring related server groups. This enhances defense capabilities against malware threats and cybercrime that is impacting millions of Americans.”
Along with Zhang and Gu, the paper was authored by Sabyasachi Saha from Symantec, USA; Sung-Ju Lee from KAIST, Korea; and Marco Mellia from Politecnico di Torina, Italy.
ICDCS is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. The conference provides a premier venue for engineers and scientists to present their research findings related to network and distributed systems.