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Article

A multifaceted approach to understanding the botnet phenomenon

Authors:

Moheeb Abu Rajab,

Fabian Monrose,

Andreas TerzisAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '06: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement

Pages 41 - 52

https://doi.org/10.1145/1177080.1177086

Published: 25 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The academic community has long acknowledged the existence of malicious botnets, however to date, very little is known about the behavior of these distributed computing platforms. To the best of our knowledge, botnet behavior has never been methodically studied, botnet prevalence on the Internet is mostly a mystery, and the botnet life cycle has yet to be modeled. Uncertainty abounds. In this paper, we attempt to clear the fog surrounding botnets by constructing a multifaceted and distributed measurement infrastructure. Throughout a period of more than three months, we used this infrastructure to track 192 unique IRC botnets of size ranging from a few hundred to several thousand infected end-hosts. Our results show that botnets represent a major contributor to unwanted Internet traffic - 27% of all malicious connection attempts observed from our distributed darknet can be directly attributed to botnet-related spreading activity. Furthermore, we discovered evidence of botnet infections in 11% of the 800,000 DNS domains we examined, indicating a high diversity among botnet victims. Taken as a whole, these results not only highlight the prominence of botnets, but also provide deep insights that may facilitate further research to curtail this phenomenon.

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Index Terms

A multifaceted approach to understanding the botnet phenomenon
1. Security and privacy
  1. Intrusion/anomaly detection and malware mitigation
  2. Systems security
    1. Operating systems security

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '06: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement

October 2006

356 pages

ISBN:1595935614

DOI:10.1145/1177080

General Chairs:
Jussara Almeida
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
,
Virgilio Almeida
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
,
Program Chair:
Paul Barford
University of Wisconsin -- Madison, USA

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 October 2006

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IMC06

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IMC06: Internet Measurement Conference

October 25 - 27, 2006

Rio de Janeriro, Brazil

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Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/ic-ETITE58242.2024.10493381
Nguyen HSubramani KAcharya BPerdisci RVadrevu P(2024)C-Frame: Characterizing and measuring in-the-wild CAPTCHA attacks2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP54263.2024.00200(277-295)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
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Lyu MHabibi Gharakheili HSivaraman V(2024)A Survey on Enterprise Network Security: Asset Behavioral Monitoring and Distributed Attack DetectionIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.341906812(89363-89383)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3419068
Carr LChavula J(2024)Deep Learning Classification for Encrypted Botnet Traffic: Optimising Model Performance and Resource UtilisationSouth African Computer Science and Information Systems Research Trends10.1007/978-3-031-64881-6_1(3-29)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
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