Categories of Botnet: A Survey

Authors: D. Seenivasan, K. Shanthi

Abstract:

Botnets are one of the most serious and widespread cyber threats. Today botnets have been facilitating many cybercrimes, especially financial, top secret thefts. Botnets can be available for lease in the market and are utilized by the cybercriminals to launch massive attacks like DDoS, click fraud, phishing attacks etc., Several large institutions, hospitals, banks, government organizations and many social networks such as twitter, facebook etc., became the target of the botmasters. Recently, noteworthy researches have been carried out to detect bot, C&C channels, botnet and botmasters. Using many sophisticated technologies, botmasters made botnet a titan of the cyber world. Innumerable challenges have been put forth by the botmasters to the researchers in the detection of botnet. In this paper we present a survey of different types of botnet C&C channels and also provide a comparison of various botnet categories. Finally we hope that our survey will create awareness for forthcoming botnet research endeavors.

Keywords: Bot, Botmaster, Botnet, Botnet cloud, Mobile Botnet.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1097401

References:

[1] David Zhao, IssaTraore, BassamSayed, Wei Lu, SherifSaad, Ali Ghorbani and Dan Garant,”Botnet detection based on traffic behavior analysis and flow intervals,”Elsevier Computers & Security, vol. 39, pp. 2-16,November 2013.
[2] Maryam Feily, AlirezaShahrestani and SureswaranRamadass,” A survey of botnet and botnet detection,” in2009Proc.IEEE third international conference on emerging security information, systemsand technologies, pp.268-273.
[3] Abdullah J. Alzahrani and Ali A. Ghorbani, “SMS mobile botnet detection using a multi-agent system: research in progress,”in2014Proc. ACM ACySE1st International Workshop on Agents and Cyber Security, no.2.
[4] Heloise Pieterse and Martin S. Olivier,” Bluetooth Command and Control channel,”Elsevier Computers & Security, vol. 45, pp. 75-83, September 2014.
[5] Jerome Francois, Shaonan Wang, Walter Bronzi, Radu State and Thomas Engel, “BotCloud:Detecting botnets using MapReduce,” in2011 Proc. IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensicsand Security, pp. 1–6.