The paper Measuring Pay-per-Install: The Commoditization of Malware Distribution, co-authored by IMDEA Software Institute Assistant Professor Juan Caballero, is the winner of an Outstanding Paper Award at the Usenix Security 2011 Symposium.
The paper reports on recent research by Caballero and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, suggesting that most malware in personal computers is covertly installed by enterprising hackers, who sell access to the compromised hosts to criminal gangs in an underground Pay-Per-Install (PPI) market. The article was recently the subject of a feature in MIT’s Technology review.
