Leet '08

As the Internet has become a universal mechanism for commerce and communication, it has also become an attractive medium for online criminal enterprise. Today, widespread vulnerabilities in both software and user behavior allow miscreants to compromise millions of hosts, conceal their activities with sophisticated system software, and manage these resources via a distributed command and control framework. This platform in turn provides economics of scale for a wide range of criminal activities including spam, phishing, DDoS, click fraud, and so on.

LEET has evolved from the combination of two other successful workshops, the ACM Workshop on Recurring Malcode (WORM) and the USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Understanding Botnets (HotBots), which have each dealt with aspects of this problem. However, while papers relating to both worms and botnets are explicitly solicited, LEET has a broader charter than its predecessors. We encourage submissions of papers that focus on any aspect of the underlying mechanisms used to compromise and control hosts, the large-scale "applications" being perpetrated upon this framework, or the social and economic networks driving these threats.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Infection vectors for malware (worms, viruses, etc.)
- Botnets, command, and control channels
- Spyware
- Operational experience
- Forensics
- Click fraud
- Measurement studies
- New threats and related challenges
- Boutique and targeted malware
- Phishing
- Spam
- Underground markets
- Carding and identity theft
- Miscreant counterintelligence
- Denial-of-service attacks
- Hardware vulnerabilities
- Legal issues
- The arms race (rootkits, anti-anti-virus, etc.)
- New platforms (cellular networks, wireless networks, mobile devices)
- Camouflage and detection
- Reverse engineering
- Vulnerability markets and zero-day economics
- Online money laundering
- Understanding the enemy
- Data collection challenges

LEET '08 will be a one-day event, Tuesday, April 15, 2008, co-located with the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '08), which will take place April 16-18, 2008.

The submissions deadline is 11:59 p.m. EST on Monday, February 11, 2008. Submissions guidelines can be found at https://www.usenix.org/legacy/leet08/cfpb/

We look forward to your submissions.

Fabian Monrose, Johns Hopkins University LEET '08 Program Chair leet08chair@usenix.org