Defenders combat online adversaries by understanding their behavior, the resources theydepend on, and their strategies and tactics. However, measuring adversarial activity directly
is often challenging, because adversaries take steps to obfuscate their behavior and evade
detection by defenders. To overcome this challenge, defenders may leverage the knowledge
that adversaries rely on licit, external resources, whose business models do not require secrecy.
These resources may therefore leak valuable information, including the prevalence of threats, the
relative effectiveness of competing adversaries, the strategies adversaries use, or the resources
and infrastructure they rely upon. Such information can help defenders prioritize threats and
decide which components of an ecosystem to target for interventions. This dissertation presents
a new framework for designing measurement techniques and interventions for online adversaries:
I leverage the information leaked by naming systems. I show that because naming systems
are both lists of an adversary’s resources and critical resources themselves, observing them
enables defenders to measure adversaries’ prevalence, compare their harmfulness, analyze their
infrastructure, and more, thus improving interventions by identifying the most effective resources
to target and prioritizing the most dangerous threats.
I present four studies that each leverage some aspect of a naming system to measure
an adversary’s behavior and inform defenses against it. First, I measure the prevalence of
overt stalkerware in the wild, by using privacy-preserving DNS cache snooping on four public
DNS resolvers. Second, I determine the location in the network of DNS redirection attacks,
by exploiting the format of certain special DNS responses. Third, I investigate the abuse of
blockchain-based naming systems (BNSes) by malware operators, and design interventions
leveraging BNS components to disrupt malware campaigns. Finally, I measure an emerging
web privacy threat, UID smuggling, by participating in the naming system built by trackers to
link user identifiers with behavioral data. In each case, I measure or design defenses against an
adversary that would be difficult to study without examining the information leaked by a naming
system.