acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

ACM TechNews

To Fight Email Scammers, Take a Different View. Literally.


View as: Print Mobile App Share:
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center last year received complaints from 300,00 victims scammed of $1.4 billion.

Researchers at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and worked with colleagues at data security firm Agari to develop a visual analytics tool that makes forensic email investigations faster.

Credit: NYU Tandon School of Engineering

In an effort to combat email scams, researchers at New York University (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering and Agari, a data security company, have developed a visual analytics tool that dramatically speeds up forensic email investigations and highlights critical links within email data.

The Beagle tool creates a visual analytical interface that can return queries as well as summarize emails and highlight commonalities between them, even in fields that investigators commonly overlook. Such fields include the time an email is sent, the geographical location of recipients, and keywords and content patterns.

Beagle was developed using a database of more than 100,000 emails intercepted from real-world scammers.

Said NYU's Enrico Bertini, "Beagle builds pictures from the data, making it much easier to connect the dots and ultimately understand how scam networks operate, from first contact with a victim through what are often multiple rounds of extortion."

From NYU Tandon School of Engineering
View Full Article

 

Abstracts Copyright © 2018 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

No entries found

Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account