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Automating analysis of large-scale botnet probing events

Published: 10 March 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Botnets dominate today's attack landscape. In this work we investigate ways to analyze collections of malicious probing traffic in order to understand the significance of large-scale "botnet probes". In such events, an entire collection of remote hosts together probes the address space monitored by a sensor in some sort of coordinated fashion. Our goal is to develop methodologies by which sites receiving such probes can infer---using purely local observation---information about the probing activity: What scanning strategies does the probing employ? Is this an attack that specifically targets the site, or is the site only incidentally probed as part of a larger, indiscriminant attack?
Our analysis draws upon extensive honeynet data to explore the prevalence of different types of scanning, including properties such as trend, uniformity, coordination, and darknet avoidance. In addition, we design schemes to extrapolate the global properties of scanning events (e.g., total population and target scope) as inferred from the limited local view of a honeynet. Cross-validating with data from DShield shows that our inferences exhibit promising accuracy.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ASIACCS '09: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Information, Computer, and Communications Security
    March 2009
    408 pages
    ISBN:9781605583945
    DOI:10.1145/1533057
    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: 10 March 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. botnet
    2. global property extrapolation
    3. honeynet
    4. scan strategy inference
    5. situational awareness
    6. statistical inference

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