Affiliate Programs: Legitimate Business or Fuelling Cybercrime?

Black Hat USA 2011

Presented by: Bradley Anstis
Date: Wednesday August 03, 2011
Time: 17:10 - 17:35
Location: Florentine
Track: Turbo Talks

The market appears to have made some progress in fighting cybercrime, spam and all the other security threats, but how much progress have we really made? In the spam area for example, attempts have been made to take down several bot networks which had limited success. However, once Spamit, a well known affiliate program used by spammers decided to close its doors, spam levels plummeted overnight. The lingering question is: are we targeting the right sources of the problem? Should we, instead, be trying to identify the money trail in cybercrime and would disrupting the trail help reduce the explosion of cybercrime levels? Affiliate programs are run by legitimate businesses and ones not so legitimate. This session looks at the different types of affiliate programs such as pay-per-install and spam referral programs, the players involved in the cybercrime community and how we know who is legitimate and who is not.

Bradley Anstis

Bradley is VP of Technical Strategy at M86 Security and spokesperson for all topics relevant to the M86 Security Labs. The M86 Security Labs team of researchers and threat analysts have built an extensive level of expertise in Cybercrime, Web malware, Bot networks and all aspects of Email and Web security. The M86 Security Labs provides 24/7 monitoring of email and Internet traffic to protect customers and publishes findings in the form of alerts or reports on the M86 Security Labs Website. Bradley is a regular speaker on both the business issues and what the industry needs to do to address IT security problem related to policies and technology. He is a 20 year veteran of the IT industry and a leading authority on the topic of Internet threats and cybercrime.


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