Abstract

Abstract: Each month many thousands of websites are compromised by criminals and repurposed to host phishing websites, distribute malware, and peddle counterfeit goods. Despite the substantial harm imposed, the number of infected websites has remained stubbornly high. In this talk we describe a case-control study to identify risk factors that are associated with higher rates of webserver compromise. Surprisingly, we find that webservers running outdated software are less likely to be compromised than those running up-to date software. We then examine what happens to webservers following compromise. We find that under 5% of hacked WordPress websites are subsequently updated, but those that do are recompromised about half as often as those that do not update.

Bio: Marie Vasek is a PhD student in the computer science department at Southern Methodist University and the research scientist at StopBadware. Her research interests include security economics and cybercrime, particularly web-based malware.