Mining Botnets and Their Evolution Patterns

Abstract

The botnet is the network of compromised computers that have fallen under the control of hackers after being infected by malicious programs such as trojan viruses. The compromised machines are mobilized to perform various attacks including mass spamming, distributed denial of service (DDoS) and additional trojans. This is becoming one of the most serious threats to the Internet infrastructure at present. We introduce a method to uncover compromised machines and characterize their behaviors using large email logs. We report various spam campaign variants with different characteristics and introduce a statistical method to combine them. We also report the long-term evolution patterns of the spam campaigns.