West, A.G., Hayati, P., Potdar, V., and Lee, I. (2012). Spamming for Science: 
Active Measurement in Web 2.0 Abuse Research. To appear in WECSR '12: 
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security Research, 
Kralendijk, Bonaire. March 2012. 


Abstract: Spam and other electronic abuses have long been a focus of 
computer security research. However, recent work in the domain has
emphasized an *economic analysis* of these operations in the hope of 
understanding and disrupting the profit model of attackers. Such studies 
do not lend themselves to passive measurement techniques. Instead, 
researchers have become middle-men or active participants in spam 
behaviors; methodologies that lie at an interesting juncture of legal, 
ethical, and human subject (e.g., IRB) guidelines.

In this work two such experiments serve as case studies: One testing a 
novel link spam model on Wikipedia and another using blackhat software 
to target blog comments and forums. Discussion concentrates on the 
experimental design process, especially as influenced by human-subject 
policy. Case studies are used to frame related work in the area, and scrutiny 
reveals the computer science community requires greater consistency in 
evaluating research of this nature.