A Spanish centre is awarded in the APWG eCrime Researcher Summit for its research against cyberattacks

· The research centre Barcelona Digital (BDigital) presented at the 5^th AntiPhising Working Group eCrime Researcher Summit, in Dallas (USA), a paper about Financial Botnets, that allows to quickly coordinate different stakeholders in order to effectively neutralize botnet infrastructure, and prosecute cybercriminals.

· The annual APWG eCrime Researchers Summit is a reference worldwide within the e-Crime research.

BDigital, a Spanish research centre specialized in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), has presented in the APWG eCrime Researcher Summit, which took place in Dallas last week, the paper “A Framework for Financial Botnet Analysis”, which has been awarded as one of the best research papers.

The paper showed the initial results of a joint research project between Barcelona Digital, the Spanish savings bank “la Caixa” and the Italian Università degli Studi di Milano. It exposed the architecture of a framework to analyze and track botnets that attack financial systems. This type of malicious infrastructure are currently causing economic losses of hundreds of millions of dollars (just in USA), stealing money from e-banking customers using stolen credentials, i.e.

The system devised by BDigital automatically detects malicious activity that could represent a threat to a financial institution and manage the needed mitigation actions together with the financial institution, law enforcement and suppliers of telecommunications infrastructure to quickly diminish the effects of the attack. Combining the intelligence of all parties, it is possible to quickly neutralize botnet and, simultaneously, to coordinate law enforcement to take appropriate legal action if the cybercriminals are finally identified.

The annual APWG eCrime Researchers Summit is a reference worldwide within the e-Crime Research. The 5^th Summit was held between October 18-20, 2010 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It brought together academic researchers, security practitioners, and law enforcement to discuss all aspects of electronic crime and ways to combat it.

For further information, please contact:

Barcelona Digital Technology Centre

Lucía Arévalo – larevalo@bdigital.org

Sarah Stracquadanio – ssh@bdigital.org
PR and Communication department

Tel.: +34 93 553 45 40  / +34 629 542 228