future internet Article A Survey on Botnets: Incentives, Evolution, Detection and Current Trends Simon Nam Thanh Vu †, Mads Stege † , Peter Issam El-Habr † , Jesper Bang † and Nicola Dragoni *,‡ DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark;
[email protected] (S.N.T.V.);
[email protected] (M.S.);
[email protected] (P.I.E.-H.);
[email protected] (J.B.) * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +45-45-25-37-31 † These authors contributed equally to this work. ‡ Current address: Richard Petersens Plads, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark. Abstract: Botnets, groups of malware-infected hosts controlled by malicious actors, have gained prominence in an era of pervasive computing and the Internet of Things. Botnets have shown a capacity to perform substantial damage through distributed denial-of-service attacks, information theft, spam and malware propagation. In this paper, a systematic literature review on botnets is presented to the reader in order to obtain an understanding of the incentives, evolution, detection, mitigation and current trends within the field of botnet research in pervasive computing. The literature review focuses particularly on the topic of botnet detection and the proposed solutions to mitigate the threat of botnets in system security. Botnet detection and mitigation mechanisms are categorised and briefly described to allow for an easy overview of the many proposed solutions. The paper also summarises the findings to identify current challenges and trends within research to help identify improvements for further botnet mitigation research. Citation: Thanh Vu, S.N.; Stege, M.; El-Habr, P.I.; Bang, J.; Dragoni, N. A Keywords: botnet; malware; security; IoT Survey on Botnets: Incentives, Evolution, Detection and Current Trends.