Built to Scale: How does Impermium process data?
In 2010, Impermium launched with a vision to handle abuse across the internet in a smart and scalable way. The architecture was designed from the ground up to ingest and analyze large amounts of data from many different social networks on an ongoing basis. Cofounders Naveen and Vish designed the data warehouse to utilize Pig,...
Internationalization in Python 2
Why does a security company like Impermium care so much about internationalization? We care about User Generated Content (UGC). A lot. At Impermium, we employ patented machine learning algorithms to stop the bad guys from spreading spam, taking over accounts and exploiting the vulnerable. When discussing adversarial machine learning, the temptation is to focus on...
Closing the Loop on Account Compromise and Social Fraud
In the process of protecting user accounts and content, Impermium sees many different types of fraudulent account activity. Tracing these instances both upstream and downstream to examine the actors and infrastructure being used to perform attacks almost always reveals a root based in economic incentive. Understanding the ontology of web fraud in order to create...
The Spell Caster – A Case Study in Adversarial Machine Learning
In a recent talk at the 2013 Strata Conference, I presented a few insights into adversarial machine learning and how it challenges traditional machine learning. I received a lot of positive feedback from attendees, and was subsequently flooded with requests for my slides and additional materials. Here, I will present an abridged version of my...
Program Management at Impermium: An Unexpected Journey
Last week, I talked about some of the challenges I’ve seen while trying to mold teams to fit rigid, defined processes that supposedly work for everyone. Here, I’d like to talk about how we’ve evolved our process to fit the individual team at Impermium. Getting to this point was difficult for me. I had to...
Breaking Free From the Cult: 6 Reasons Why Agile Doesn’t Work
For the last six years, I have been trying to create a real, true Agile environment. I’ve gotten teams together and tried to follow the rules, doing everything “right” to achieve true Agile productivity. I’ve tried. My coworkers, colleagues, and fellow program managers have tried too. At this point, I’m ready to call it. Agile...
He’s Having a (H)MAC Attack!
In building a stateless web services API (e.g. a RESTful one), developers often must consider the chance that an attacker might attempt to spoof a call on behalf of a legitimate client. For example, if the attacker—Evil Enterprises—were to spoof a request to an event-logging API used legitimately by Alpha Incorporated with garbage or inaccurate values,...
Productizing Web-Scale Machine Learning Systems
With the (re-)emergence of machine learning as a fundamental component for the current social web and the upcoming semantic web, increasing the accessibility (and applicability) of learning algorithms is becoming important. In the engineering team here at Impermium, we often need to quickly stand up internally available classification and regression services to help advance our...
Answers to Developer Questions on Fighting Social Spam
We get a lot of questions from customers, prospects, and Q&A forums like Quora about the technical strategies and tactics on preventing social spam. They wonder how Impermium does it, and how other prominent social networks are fighting their battles. Below is a quick summary on a few popular developer topics including domain blocking, URL...
Developers: Salt Thy Passwords
With groups like LulzSec leaking passwords left-and-right, it seemed like a good time to remind developers the importance of never ever ever storing passwords in the clear, and always using cryptographic Salt when storing them. For those not familiar with the terms, or who think “my site isn’t a target so it’s not a big...
Hosting That Repository
Several weeks back I wrote about setting up a local repository for .deb packages. Well we’re growing and adding machines, so it was time to move that local repository to a centralized location. It shouldn’t be hard, but it did have a few more steps than I hoped. The essence was around building the repository...
Kaggle Competition Helps Impermium Detect Insults in Social Commentary
Nov 20, 2012 • No Comments