Fighting botnets - a systematic approach

• Author(s): Rodrigues, Nuno G. ; Nogueira, António ; Salvador, Paulo
• Date: 2012
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/7686
• Origin: Biblioteca Digital do IPB
• Subject(s): Network security; Malware; Botnet; Network resilience
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

The increasing impact of Internet in the global economy has transformed botnets into one of the most feared security threats for citizens, organizations and governments. Despite the significant efforts that have been made over the last years to understand this phenomenon and develop detection techniques and countermeasures, this continues to be a field with big challenges to address. The most important detection approaches and countermeasures that have been proposed are usually oriented to address some specific type of botnet threat or fight botnets in particular scenarios or conditions. This paper proposes a generic and systematic model to describe the network dynamics whenever a botnet threat is detected, defining all actors, dimensions, states and actions that need to be taken into account at each moment. We believe that the proposed model can be the basis for developing systematic and integrated frameworks, strategies and tools to predict and fight botnet threats in an efficient way.