SecurityFocus: "Viruses, Phishing, and Trojans For Profit"

Thursday, October 26. 2006
Kelly Martin from SecurityFocus published a nice article regarding the economic aspects of the underground: "Viruses, Phishing, and Trojans For Profit" is definitely an interesting read with links to many other articles. And I'm now off to start my YouTube :-)
Posted by Thorsten Holz in paper at 12:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A Multifaceted Approach to Understanding the Botnet Phenomenon

Thursday, October 19. 2006
At the upcoming Internet Measurement Conference 2006, one of the papers deals with botnets. The paper entitled "A Multifaceted Approach to Understanding the Botnet Phenomenon" by Moheeb Abu Rajab, Jay Zarfoss, Fabian Monrose, and Andreas Terzis from Johns Hopkins University presents results from their botnet studies. The data they have collected are very similar to the ones we have collected at the German Honeynet Project. In fact, they use nepenthes as one of the basic blocks of their system. They then analyze the collected binaries via "graybox testing" (logging of all network-related activity + active IRC testing) - perhaps CWSandbox would yield better results. The resulting botnet information is then used to track the botnet with a drone - a similar approach we had presented in the "Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets" and our ESORICS'05 papers. They also use DNS cache snooping to learn more about malicious DNS entries.

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 botnetrelated 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.

Continue reading "A Multifaceted Approach to Understanding the Botnet Phenomenon"

Posted by Thorsten Holz in paper at 13:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Call for Paper: HotBots '07

Wednesday, October 18. 2006
The Call for Papers for the First Workshop on Hot Topics in Understanding Botnets (HotBots '07) is now available. I am very proud to be one of the members of the program committee and would love to see many submissions to the conference.

HotBots '07 will be co-located with the 4th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI '07), which will take place April 11–13, 2007 in Cambridge, MA.

Important dates:
  • Paper submissions due: February 26, 2007

  • Notification to authors: March 19, 2007

  • Final papers due: April 2, 2007

The conference will be held at April 10, 2007, in Cambridge, MA.

Overview:
Preliminary research or experience papers are solicited for the First Workshop on Hot Topics in Understanding Botnets (HotBots '07).

HotBots is intended as a forum for lively discussion of innovative ideas, recent progress, or practical experience in understanding all aspects of botnets. Intriguing preliminary results and thought-provoking ideas will be strongly favored. Papers will be selected for their potential to stimulate discussion in the workshop.


HotBots '07 will be a one-day event, Tuesday, April 10, 2007, co-located with the 4th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI '07) in Cambridge, MA.

Workshop Format
To ensure a productive workshop environment, attendance will be by invitation and/or acceptance of paper submission.

Each author will have 15 minutes to present his or her idea, followed by 15 minutes of discussion with the workshop participants.

Continue reading "Call for Paper: HotBots '07"

Posted by Thorsten Holz in administrativa, paper at 13:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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