Botnets have continuously evolved since their inception as a malicious entity. Attackers come up with new botnet designs that exploit the weaknesses in existing defense mechanisms and continue to evade detection. It is necessary to analyze the weaknesses of existing defense mechanisms to find out the lacunae in them. This research exposes a weakness found in an existing bot detection method (BDM) by implementing a specialized P2P botnet model and carrying out experiments on it. Weaknesses that are found and validated can be used to predict the development path of botnets, and as a result, detection and mitigation measures can be implemented in a proactive fashion. The main contribution of this work is to demonstrate the exploitation pattern of an inherent weakness in local-host alert correlation (LHAC) based methods and to assert that current LHAC implementations could allow pockets of cooperative bots to hide in an enterprise size network. This work suggests that additional monitoring capabilities must be added to current LHAC-based methods in order for them to remain a viable bot detection mechanism. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
['Brandon Shirley', 'Lokesh Babu', 'Chad D. Mano']
Bot detection evasion: a case study on local-host alert correlation bot detection methods