Beheading Hydras: Performing Effective Botnet Takedowns Yacin Nadji Manos Antonakakis Roberto Perdisci College of Computing Damballa, Inc. Department of Computer Georgia Institute of Atlanta, GA Science Technology
[email protected] University of Georgia Atlanta, GA Athens, GA
[email protected] [email protected] David Dagon Wenke Lee College of Computing College of Computing Georgia Institute of Georgia Institute of Technology Technology Atlanta, GA Atlanta, GA
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT Categories and Subject Descriptors Devices infected with malicious software typically form bot- K.6.m [Management of Computing and Information net armies under the influence of one or more command and Systems]: Security; K.5.m [Legal Aspects of Comput- control (C&C) servers. The botnet problem reached such ing]: Contracts levels where federal law enforcement agencies have to step in and take actions against botnets by disrupting (or \taking General Terms down") their C&Cs, and thus their illicit operations. Lately, more and more private companies have started to indepen- Botnets dently take action against botnet armies, primarily focusing on their DNS-based C&Cs. While well-intentioned, their Keywords C&C takedown methodology is in most cases ad-hoc, and botnet takedowns; takedown analysis; takedown policy limited by the breadth of knowledge available around the malware that facilitates the botnet. With this paper, we aim to bring order, measure, and 1. INTRODUCTION reason to the botnet takedown problem. We propose a Botnets represent a persistent threat to Internet security. takedown analysis and recommendation system, called rza, To effectively counter botnets, security researchers and law that allows researchers to perform two tasks: 1) a post- enforcement organizations have been recently relying more mortem analysis of past botnet takedowns, and 2) provide and more on botnet takedown operations.