full-disclosure - Know Your Enemy: Tracking Botnets

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From: thorsten.holz at mmweg.rwth-aachen.de (Thorsten Holz)
Subject: Know Your Enemy: Tracking Botnets

Greetings,

The  Honeynet Project and Research Alliance is excited to announce the
release of a new paper "KYE: Tracking Botnets". This paper is based on
the extensive research by the German Honeynet Project.

    KYE: Tracking Botnets
    http://www.honeynet.org/papers/bots/

Abstract:
---------

Honeypots are a well known technique for discovering the tools, tactics,
and motives of attackers. In this paper we look at a special kind of
threat: the individuals and organizations who run botnets. A botnet is a
network of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an
attacker. Due to their immense size (tens of thousands of systems can be
linked together), they pose a severe threat to the community. With the
help of honeynets we can observe the people who run botnets - a task
that is difficult using other techniques. Due to the wealth of data
logged, it is possible to reconstruct the actions of attackers, the
tools they use, and study them in detail. In this paper we take a closer
look at botnets, common attack techniques, and the individuals involved.

We start with an introduction to botnets and how they work, with
examples of their uses. We then briefly analyze the three most common
bot variants used. Next we discuss a technique to observe botnets,
allowing us to monitor the botnet and observe all commands issued by the
attacker. We present common behavior we captured, as well as statistics
on the quantitative information learned through monitoring more than one
hundred botnets during the last few months. We conclude with an overview
of lessons learned and point out further research topics in the area of
botnet-tracking, including a tool called mwcollect2 that focuses on
collecting malware in an automated fashion.

Thank you for your time,
   Thorsten Holz, on behalf of the GHP 
(http://www-i4.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/lufg/honeynet)