Dirty Jobs: The Role of Freelance Labor in Web Service Abuse
Marti Motoyama, Damon McCoy, Kirill Levchenko, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, University of California, San Diego
Modern Web services inevitably engender abuse, as attackers find ways to exploit a service and its user base. However, while defending against such abuse is generally considered a technical endeavor, we argue that there is an increasing role played by human labor markets. Using over seven years of data from the popular crowdsourcing site Freelancer.com, as well data from our own active job solicitations, we characterize the labor market involved in service abuse. We identify the largest classes of abuse work, including account creation, social networking link generation and search engine optimization support, and characterize how pricing and demand have evolved in supporting this activity.
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author = {Marti Motoyama and Damon McCoy and Kirill Levchenko and Stefan Savage and Geoffrey M. Voelker},
title = {Dirty Jobs: The Role of Freelance Labor in Web Service Abuse},
booktitle = {20th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 11)},
year = {2011},
address = {San Francisco, CA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenix-security-11/dirty-jobs-role-freelance-labor-web-service-abuse},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}