Towards detection of botnet communication through social media by monitoring user activity
ICISS'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Information Systems Security
Dissecting SpyEye - Understanding the design of third generation botnets
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
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Recently, botnet, a network of compromised computers, has been recognized as the biggest threat to the Internet. The bots in a botnet communicate with the botnet owner via a communication channel called Command and Control (C&C) channel. There are three main C&C channels: Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and web-based protocols. By exploiting the flexibility of the Web 2.0 technology, the web-based botnet has reached a new level of sophistication. In August 2009, such botnet was found on Twitter, one of the most popular Web 2.0 services. In this paper, we will describe a new type of botnet that uses Web 2.0 service as a C&C channel and a temporary storage for their stolen information. We will then propose a novel approach to thwart this type of attack. Our method applies a unique identifier of the computer, an encryption algorithm with session keys and a CAPTCHA verification.