An approach for detecting self-propagating email using anomaly detection

Abstract

This paper develops a new approach for detecting self-propagating email viruses based on statistical anomaly detection. Our approach assumes that a key objective of an email virus attack is to eventually overwhelm mail servers and clients with a large volume of email traffic. Based on this assumption, the approach is designed to detect increases in traffic volume over what was observed during the training period. This paper describes our approach and the results of our simulation-based experiments in assessing the effectiveness of the approach in an intranet setting. Within the simulation setting, our results establish that the approach is effective in detecting attacks all of the time, with very few false alarms. In addition, attacks could be detected sufficiently early so that clean up efforts need to target only a fraction of the email clients in an intranet. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.