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Correlating file-based malware graphs against the empirical ground truth of DNS graphs

Published: 28 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This exploratory empirical paper investigates whether the sharing of unique malware files between domains is empirically associated with the sharing of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and the sharing of normal, non-malware files. By utilizing a graph theoretical approach with a web crawling dataset from F-Secure, the paper finds no robust statistical associations, however. Unlike what might be expected from the still continuing popularity of shared hosting services, the sharing of IP addresses through the domain name system (DNS) seems to neither increase nor decrease the sharing of malware files. In addition to these exploratory empirical results, the paper contributes to the field of DNS mining by elaborating graph theoretical representations that are applicable for analyzing different network forensics problems.

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  • (2017)Investigating the Agility Bias in DNS Graph Mining2017 IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (CIT)10.1109/CIT.2017.55(253-260)Online publication date: Aug-2017

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  1. Correlating file-based malware graphs against the empirical ground truth of DNS graphs

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ECSAW '16: Proccedings of the 10th European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops
    November 2016
    234 pages
    ISBN:9781450347815
    DOI:10.1145/2993412
    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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    Published: 28 November 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. DNS mining
    2. complex network analysis
    3. cyber security
    4. ground truth problem
    5. network forensics
    6. shared hosting

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    ECSAW '16
    ECSAW '16: European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops
    November 28 - December 2, 2016
    Copenhagen, Denmark

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    • (2017)Investigating the Agility Bias in DNS Graph Mining2017 IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (CIT)10.1109/CIT.2017.55(253-260)Online publication date: Aug-2017

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