Spam campaign detection, analysis, and investigation

Spam has been a major tool for criminals to conduct illegal activities on the Internet, such as stealing sensitive information, selling counterfeit goods, distributing malware, etc. The astronomical amount of spam data has rendered its manual analysis impractical. Moreover, most of the current techniques are either too complex to be applied on a large amount of data or miss the extraction of vital security insights for forensic purposes. In this paper, we elaborate a software framework for spam campaign detection, analysis and investigation. The proposed framework identifies spam campaigns on-the-fly. Additionally, it labels and scores the campaigns as well as gathers various information about them. The elaborated framework provides law enforcement officials with a powerful platform to conduct investigations on cyber-based criminal activities. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).