External Awards

SAINT2011 Best Paper Award

Winners: Mitsuaki Akiyama, Takeshi Yagi, and Mitsutaka Ito, NTT Information Sharing Platform Laboratories

Date: July 19, 2011

Organization: IEEE/IPSJ

For “Searching Structural Neighborhood of Malicious URLs to Improve Blacklisting”.

Filtering based on blacklists is a major countermeasure against malicious websites. However, blacklists must be updated because malicious URLs (uniform resource locators) tend to be short-lived and their sub strings may be partially mutated to avoid blacklisting. Due to these characteristics, it can be assumed that unknown malicious URLs exist in the neighborhood of known malicious URLs, created by the same adversary. We propose an effective blacklist URL generation method. We try to discover URLs in the neighborhood of a malicious URL by using a search engine. Those suspicious neighborhoods around malicious URLs require further investigation to determine their blacklisting candidacy. We experimentally evaluated this generation method by using real blacklisted URLs for both drive-by-download and click-download infection. The results showed that our method can effectively improve identification of malicious URLs and maintenance of the coverage of blacklists.
Published as: M. Akiyama, T. Yagi, and M. Itoh, “Searching Structural Neighborhood of Malicious URLs to Improve Blacklisting,” Proc. of the 2011 IEEE/IPSJ 11th International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT), pp. 1–10, Munich, Bavaria.

IEICE Distinguished Service Award

Winner: Takashi Ikebe, Service Control Platform Development Project, Third Promotion Project, NTT Network Service Systems Laboratories

Date: Sep. 14, 2011

Organization: IEICE Communications Society

For contributions to conducting conferences for the technical committee on network systems as an assistant to the Secretary General.