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Understanding Botnets: Insights from The Honeynet Project Research

This presentation by Jonathan Dowdle delves into the complexities of botnets and their impact on cybersecurity. It defines what botnets and honeynets are, identifies their victims, explores vulnerabilities, and reveals the various illicit uses of botnets including DDoS attacks, spam, keylogging, and identity theft. The research draws from the Honeynet’s experience setting up and analyzing a honeynet of three machines over four months, resulting in the observation of over 220,000 unique IP addresses and 35 active botnets. Insights into IRC-based botnet operations and recommendations for further research are also provided.

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Understanding Botnets: Insights from The Honeynet Project Research

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Presentation Transcript

  1. Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets The Honeynet Project & Research Alliance Presented by: Jonathan Dowdle

  2. Motivation • To study the activities of BotNets and their owners

  3. What a Botnet is Not

  4. Introduction • What is a BotNet? • What is a HoneyNet? • Who are the victims? • What vulnerabilities are used? • What can a BotNet be used for?

  5. HoneyNet

  6. BotNet

  7. Method • Setup • HoneyNet of 3 machines • Analysis • mwcollectd2 • drone

  8. Uses of Botnets • DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) Attack • Spamming • Sniffing Traffic • Keylogging • Spreading Malware • Google AdSense Abuse • Attacking IRC Networks (similar to DDoS) • Manipulating online polls/games • Mass identity theft

  9. Types of Bots • Most common bots • Agobot / Phatbot / Forbot / XtremBot • SDBot / RBot / UrBot / UrXBot • GT-Bots • Less common bots • DSNX Bots • Q8 Bots • kaiten • Perl-based bots

  10. How Bots Work

  11. How Bots Work

  12. The Server • Unreal IRCd • ConferenceRoom

  13. HoneyNet

  14. Tracking Botnets • IRC login information is sniffed when bot on Honeypot connects • Using login information gathered we can connect to master IRC server

  15. Tracking Botnets -- Observing • Commands from master can be observed in channel • Custom IRC client is usually needed

  16. Custom IRC Client • drone

  17. Lessons Learned • Number of botnets • 100 botnets over 4 months • 35 “live” botnets as of paper’s publish date • Number of hosts • ~220,000 unique IP addresses joining at least one of the monitored channels • The number may be larger due to some hosts not showing joining clients into a channel

  18. Lessons Learned Cont. • Typical Size of Botnets • 100s – up to 50,000 hosts • Dimension of DDoS-attacks • 226 DDoS-attacks against 99 unique targets

  19. Strengths • Moderate learning curve • Paper is presented in ordinary language • Novel method of determining methods and attacks used by Botnet owners

  20. Weaknesses • Focuses only IRC-based bots • More data could have been provided

  21. Further Research • Vulnerability modules • Shellcode parsing modules • Fetch modules

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