Don't Look Now! Malicious Image Spam [ShmooCon 2015]

Kathy Liszka A picture is worth a thousand words. I've also found it contains malware and other interesting items if one looks past the wavy words, pills, sailboats and pornography. I have a corpus of more than 10,000 spam images provided daily by Knujon over a period of about 5 years. I've had students categorize the images, perform steganalysis, and extract malware. Images have their own unique methods to evade spam filters. This talk is about my corpus and the things we've found lurking in the wild. Kathy Liszka is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Akron. Her research area used to be parallel algorithms for the majority of her career until she got bored. Security is a fascinating and broad topic so she developed two courses with a heavy lab component for students to get an exposure to the field.