ZEUSMILKER: Circumventing the P2P Zeus Neighbor List Restriction Mechanism Shankar Karuppayah∗¶, Stefanie Roos‡, Christian Rossow§, Max Muhlh¨ auser¨ ∗, Mathias Fischer† ∗ Telecooperation Group † Networking and Security Group Technische Universitat¨ Darmstadt / CASED, Germany International Computer Science Institute, USA fi
[email protected] mfi
[email protected] § Cluster of Excellence, MMCI ‡Privacy and Data Security ¶ National Advanced IPv6 Center, Saarland University, Germany TU Dresden, Germany Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM),
[email protected] [email protected] Malaysia Abstract—The emerging trend of highly-resilient Peer-to-Peer Monitoring P2P botnets requires reverse-engineering of the (P2P) botnets poses a huge security threat to our modern society. botnet’s malware to at least extract the botnet’s communication Carefully designed countermeasures as applied in sophisticated protocol as well as a seedlist of potential active bots. After- P2P botnets such as P2P Zeus impede botnet monitoring and wards, an analyst can start gathering intelligence about the successive takedown. These countermeasures reduce the accuracy botnet by either injecting sensor nodes or by actively crawling of the monitored data, such that an exact reconstruction of it. Sensor nodes [4], [5] can obtain a complete overview of the the botnet’s topology is hard to obtain efficiently. However, an accurate topology snapshot, revealing particularly the identities botnet population, but do not reveal the graph structure of the of all bots, is crucial to execute effective botnet takedown botnet. However, such connectivity information (“who knows operations. With the goal of obtaining the required snapshot whom”) is required to launch successful takedown attempts in an efficient manner, we provide a detailed description and such as sinkholing [4], [6].