Olivier van der Toorn, a Ph.D. student in the DACS group, won the Best Paper Award at the NOMS 2018 Conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The award committee appreciated Olivier's paper entitled: "Melting the Snow: Using Active DNS Measurements to Detect Snowshoe Spam Domains". In his paper, Olivier presents a new way to detect the notoriously hard to detect snowshoe spam. Using data from the unique OpenINTEL platform in combination with machine learning, Olivier's method for detection can detect spam domains up to 180 days before they appear on the blacklists that are commonly used to combat spam. Olivier's method was validated at SURFnet, in the SURFmailfilter service. SURFnet was so impressed by his results that they decided to start using his results in production.
As a show of appreciation for his work, Olivier received an award certificate and an NT$ 10,000 cash prize.
Proud co-authors Anna Sperotto and Roland van Rijswijk-Deij (both from DACS) and Bart Geesink (from SURFnet) also received award certificates.
Olivier's work is supported through the TIDE project, funded by SIDN Fonds.
