Leveraging Organizational Etiquette to Improve Internet Security

As more and more organizations rely on the Internet for their daily operation, Internet security becomes increasingly critical. Unfortunately, the vast resources available on the Internet are attracting many malicious users and organizations, including organized crime syndicates. With such organizations disguising their activity by operating from the machines owned and operated by legitimate organizations, we argue that responsible organizations could improve overall Internet security by strengthening their own. By improving their organizational etiquette, legitimate organizations will make it more difficult for malicious users and organizations to hide. Towards this goal, we propose a system to identify and eliminate malicious activity on edge networks. We use a year-long trace of activity from an edge network to characterize the malicious activity at an edge network and demonstrate the potential effectiveness of our system.