Botnets: The Real Threat

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Abstract─Distantly controlled and managed (by botmaster or botherder) malicious software (called botnets or ‘bot armies’) hidden in large number of computers may cause extraordinary likely damage to the Internet. Botnets can initiate massive coordinated attacks upon Internet resources and its infrastructure devices. The most likely potential uses of botnets are distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, spamming, sniffing traffic, keylogging, installing advertisement addons and google adsense abuse, attacking internet relay chat (IRC) networks, attacking peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) networks, and mass identity theft etc. This research is intended to review and analyze all aspects of well known botnets applications like IRC, P2P, HTTP and miscellaneous category. The study will focus on botnets measuring techniques, botnet behaviour, DDoS technology, botnet modeling, complexity of botnet software, setting up an IRC honeypot on network, and different botnets mitigation techniques and defense approaches against botnets etc. Mainly bots go unnoticed unless the botmaster makes a mistake. Presently, wide-ranging efficient defensive technologies are lacking. As botmasters carry on to improve their capabilities, awareness will be essential in enhancing bot defenses.

The goal of this research is to review all salient research work being done in this domain and present critical review so that efficient mitigation and defensive framework against botnets can be proposed.

Keywords- botnet; IRC botnets; HTTP botnets; P2P botnetse; miscellanious botnets; botmaster; detection; mitigation; defensive framework; threat.

I. INTRODUCTION

Botnets software is usually installed through all type of attacki...

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...gon Kim.: BotGAD: detecting botnets by capturing group activities in network traffic: In Proceedings: Fourth International ICST Conference on Communication System Software and Middleware, Dublin, Ireland, 2009.

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[31] A Taste of HTTP Botnets-www.team-cymru.org/ReadingRoom/

Whitepapers/2008/http-botnets.pdf

[32] Julian B. Grizzard, Vikram Sharma, Chris Nunnery, and Brent Byung

Hoon Kang.: Peer-to-Peer Botnets: Overview and Case Study-http:// www.usenix.org/event/hotbots07/tech/full_papers/grizzard/grizzard_html/

[33] 2010 Threat Predictions Report By McAfee Labs

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