Measuring the Impact of Sharing Abuse Data with Web Hosting Providers

Sharing incident data among Internet operators is widely seen as an important strategy in combating cybercrime. However, little work has been done to quantify the positive benefits of such sharing. To that end, we report on an observational study of URLs blacklisted for distributing malware that the non-profit anti-malware organization StopBadware shared with requesting web hosting providers. Our dataset comprises over 28,000 URLs shared with 41 organizations between 2010 and 2015. We show that sharing has an immediate effect of cleaning the reported URLs and reducing the likelihood that they will be recompromised; despite this, we find that long-lived malware takes much longer to clean, even after being reported. Furthermore, we find limited evidence that one-time sharing of malware data improves the malware cleanup response of all providers over the long term. Instead, some providers improve while others worsen.