Introduction
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1 Introduction A botnet is a network of compromised computers (called bots) that can be remotely controlled by an attacker through a predefined command and control (C&C) channel such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Peer-to-Peer (P2P) or Web-based protocols [1]. Botnets have been recognized as the biggest threat to the Internet because of the mag- nitude and potency of attacks afforded by their combined bandwidth and processing power. Attacks from botnets include DDoS attacks, spamming, traffic sniffing, key logging, identity theft and spreading malware [2]. These types of attacks used to happen before due to the appearance of computer viruses and worms, however, with the emergence of botnets, the scope, sophistication as well as damage of these attacks have been raised to a much higher level. For example, since 2006, email account holders have experienced an unprecedented growth of unsolicited 1 2 Introduction emails (also called spam). It is interesting to learn why spam has grown so quickly despite extensive efforts of the leading IT companies (such as Microsoft) that have produced a myriad of anti-spam software tools. One reason seems to be that spam is profitable. It is a cheap and efficient way of advertising and luring unexpected users to give out their private data and/or download malware. Even during the economic downtime in 2009, the group of Russian spammers behind most Viagra spam still raked in an average of $4000 a day [3]. Spam has gained a prominence because it is a crucial component in many cyber-crime activities. An interesting kind of spam is phishing. Phishing tries to coax naive users into giving up access to their bank accounts or credit card information. The stolen bank creden- tials are used to transfer money or withdraw money from victims' bank accounts while stolen credit card information is used to buy products online. Collections of stolen bank credentials are themselves products that are being sold online. In general, ac- cording to data presented in [4], a single phishing attack costs a US financial institution approximately $50,000, which gives the loss of more than $50 per account. The dramatic increase of spam is due to the distributed nature of botnets. A large collection of bots working independently (although co-ordinated by their botmasters) is able to produce billions of spam emails per day. At the same time, it is very diffi- cult to block the influx of spam. The designers of malware use different techniques to make the bots stealthy. Once a computer has been infected by a bot, it behaves in the same way as before the infection. This is quite different from an infection by a virus, when the performance of the infected machine deteriorates dramatically. To minimise a chance of detection, bots are active only when they perform necessary actions and most of the time are inactive. There is a well developed anti-spam technology that is based on content filters, black lists (blocks emails coming from addresses or IPs in the list), white lists (only ac- cept emails from addresses or IPs in the list) and challenge/response system (eg use 3 Captcha to verify if the sender is not a bot). Unfortunately, traditional anti-spam tools fail when spam is generated by botnets. Besides using different techniques to avoid content detection and break Captcha to pass challenge/response system, spam- mers now use thousands of other people's computers (botnet) to send spam without the knowledge of the owners. Many computers are only used to send spam once or once in a while [5] that makes it very hard to detect and shut down the spam sources. Since there are so many computers involved in sending spam now, there is no blacklist able to list them all. Even worse, anti-spam software with a high rate of false-positives create a lot of false alarms and block emails coming from legitimate sources. The designers of malware started to use botnets to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS). This is a variant of denial of service (DoS) attack that uses all bots within the botnet to flood an attacked server with requests [6,7]. Note that because bots are scattered over the Internet, it is very difficult to identify the source of the attack. The traffic in the Internet looks normal except in the neighbourhood of the server where all requests (generated by bots) converge. As a result, it takes a lot of effort and co- ordination among security managers of different network domains to identify the source of the attack. Clearly, identifying all bots is an option. A better option, however, is the identification of the botmaster and the person (cyber criminal) behind it. However, it is very hard to identify the bad guy controlling the DDoS attack because he/she uses other people's computers to execute the attack. How big is the security threat coming from botnets? The number of infected machines in the Internet is difficult to determine because it grows quite rapidly. In 2009, McAfree [8,9] estimates that 150 thousand machines get infected by bots every day, which is a three-fold increase compared to the rate reported by Symantec [10]. More recent works [8, 11] report that in 2010 the BredoLab botnet alone consists of more than 30 millions bots located on compromised machines. It is evident that the presence of bots alone poses a serious threat to the global Internet community. 4 Introduction In another research, Spamhaus.com [12] found that in 2010, botnets contributed 95% of the total spam. The king of spam was the Rustock botnet which produced 200 billion pieces of spam a day [13, 14]. According to Mailshine.com [15], estimation of global productivity cost of spam in 2010 was about $103 billion dollars. Loss of productivity was calculated based on: • the average time spent by the recipient per spam message was half a second • the average wage of the recipient is $10 per hour. Other malicious activities of botnets such as DDoS, identity theft and click fraud also cause a lot of financial losses. During the last decade, the production and dissemination of botnets has grown into a multibillion dollar business. In the last survey conducted by Ponmone [16] for 50 US campanies that were the victims of botnet attacks in 2011, the average annual loss was just below 6 million US dollars for each company. Accord- ing to Ponmone [16], damages caused by malware activities especially botnets together with the costs of preventive measures are likely to grow significantly in the coming years. Botnets are already a part of the Internet landscape and their impact on the Internet (in)security is difficult to estimate. Unfortunately, the development of security coun- termeasures against botnets drags behind the progress in the botnet technology. Some experts claim that we are losing the botnet war [2, 17{19]. There are, however, some successes in the war against botnets. Here we give three examples. • Honeynet project [20] is a leading international security research organization, devoted for investigating the latest attacks, developing open source security tools to improve Internet security and learning how malicious hackers behave. From a small group of members started in 1999, the project now expands into many chapters around the world. The valuable information collected by the project is not only useful for security research to analyze the latest attacks but also to educate the public about threats to information systems across the world. • BotHunter [21] is a free detection software created by SRI International to help system administrators detect botnet activity within their network. By monitoring 5 the two-way communication flows between hosts within the internal network and the Internet and basing on state-based infection sequence models, BotHunter has successfully detected many types of bots including P2P ones. • Rustock is a bot, whose main task is to distribute spam email. It is probably the most successful spam bot to date. It has infected more than one million PC machines [22]. However, the Rustock botnet was shut down by a group of companies led by Microsoft in 2011 [13]. The group was able to track the botnet C&C servers and identify their IP addresses. It turned out that the C&C servers were located on many servers of five major Internet service providers across the US. Outside the US, Microsoft worked with European law enforcement agencies to identify the C&C servers. Finally, all C&C servers were shutdown putting an end to Rustock activity. Despite many successes, it is clear that there is a lack of comprehensive countermea- sures to combat botnets. Such countermeasures have to be global covering the whole Internet. So apart from technical tools, there is a need for the co-ordination of coun- termeasures that are applied in different domains and countries. Botnets work so effectively because they are able to communicate with their botmasters. The communication channel (also called communication and control (C&C) channel) can be built in many different ways. The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol was the first and most popular protocol that was used as a C&C channel. However, since the IRC channel has become too easy to detect, the number of IRC botnets is on the decline [23]. Therefore, designers of bots have shifted to web-based and P2P services to implement C&C channels. With the growing usage of social networks, it has been observed a shift in the design methodology. So, designers of bots start using Web 2.0 social networks as a vehicle for the botnet construction. Bots that are using Web 2.0 services are called Web 2.0 bots.