applied sciences Article An Adaptive Multi-Layer Botnet Detection Technique Using Machine Learning Classifiers Riaz Ullah Khan 1,* , Xiaosong Zhang 1, Rajesh Kumar 1 , Abubakar Sharif 1, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz 1 and Mamoun Alazab 2 1 Center of Cyber Security, School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +86-155-2076-3595 Received: 19 March 2019; Accepted: 24 April 2019; Published: 11 June 2019 Abstract: In recent years, the botnets have been the most common threats to network security since it exploits multiple malicious codes like a worm, Trojans, Rootkit, etc. The botnets have been used to carry phishing links, to perform attacks and provide malicious services on the internet. It is challenging to identify Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets as compared to Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and other types of botnets because P2P traffic has typical features of the centralization and distribution. To resolve the issues of P2P botnet identification, we propose an effective multi-layer traffic classification method by applying machine learning classifiers on features of network traffic. Our work presents a framework based on decision trees which effectively detects P2P botnets. A decision tree algorithm is applied for feature selection to extract the most relevant features and ignore the irrelevant features.