Botnet: Understanding Behavior, Life Cycle Events & Actions

Abstract

This paper examines botnet behavior and provides the basis for the development of an application tool used to investigate the properties of botnets in large-scale networks. Botnets are breaching security and data safety and are used by hackers for initiating various cyber-attacks. Botnet causes various problems such as information search and theft, denial of service attack, sending SPAM e-mail, and so on. The purpose of this paper is to study basic details of security threats that users of Internet are facing from malicious botnets. There is a need to develop effective mechanism for detecting and mitigating the malicious behavior of botnets. This study helps: (i) To understand behavior of bots and Botmaster. (ii) To study botnet topologies, behavior, lifecycle events and actions; and (iii) to study preventive steps to stop the botnet attacks. Keywords— Botnet, Bot, Botnet Maker, Botmaster, Botnet Detector, Zombie, IRC, DDoS, Spam, Internet Security, Bot Hunter, WebSecurity