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Detection and Classification of Different Botnet C&C Channels

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Autonomic and Trusted Computing (ATC 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6906))

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Abstract

Unlike other types of malware, botnets are characterized by their command and control (C&C) channels, through which a central authority, the botmaster, may use the infected computer to carry out malicious activities. Given the damage botnets are capable of causing, detection and mitigation of botnet threats are imperative. In this paper, we present a host-based method for detecting and differentiating different types of botnet infections based on their C&C styles, e.g., IRC-based, HTTP-based, or peer-to-peer (P2P) based. Our ability to detect and classify botnet C&C channels shows that there is an inherent similarity in C&C structures for different types of bots and that the network characteristics of botnet C&C traffic is inherently different from legitimate network traffic. The best performance of our detection system has an overall accuracy of 0.929 and a false positive rate of 0.078.

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Fedynyshyn, G., Chuah, M.C., Tan, G. (2011). Detection and Classification of Different Botnet C&C Channels. In: Calero, J.M.A., Yang, L.T., Mármol, F.G., García Villalba, L.J., Li, A.X., Wang, Y. (eds) Autonomic and Trusted Computing. ATC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6906. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23496-5_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23496-5_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23495-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23496-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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