Paper: "Botnet Phenomenon" and "Chinese Underground Economy"

Honeyblog.org has released two very interesting papers:

• Characterizing the IRC-based Botnet Phenomenon

Abstract:

Botnets, networks of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker, are one of the most common attack platforms nowadays. They can, for example, be used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal sensitive information, or send spam emails. A long-term measurement study of botnet activities is useful as a basis for further research on global botnet mitigation and disruption techniques. We have built a distributed and fully-automated botnet measurement system which allows us to collect data on the botnet activity we observe in China. Based on the analysis of tracking records of 3,290 IRC-based botnets during a period of almost twelve months, this paper presents several novel results of botnet activities which can only be measured via long-term easurements. These include. amongst others, botnet lifetime, botnet discovery trends and distributions, command and control channel distributions, botnet size and end-host distributions. Furthermore, our measurements confirm and extend several previous results from this area.

Our results show that the botnet problem is of global scale, with a scattered distribution of the control infrastructure and also a scattered distribution of the victims. Furthermore, the control infrastructure itself is rather flexible, with an average lifetime of a Command & Control server of about 54 days. These results can also leverage research in the area of botnet detection, mitigation, and disruption: only by understanding the problem in detail, we can develop efficient counter measures.

• Studying Malicious Websites and the Underground Economy on the Chinese Web

Abstract:

The World Wide Web gains more and more popularity within China with more than 1.31 million websites on the Chinese Web in June 2007. Driven by the economic profits, cyber criminals are on the rise and use the Web to exploit innocent users. In fact, a real underground black market with thousand of participants has developed which brings together malicious users who trade exploits, malware, virtual assets, stolen credentials, and more. In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of this underground black market and present a model to describe the market. We substantiate our model with the help of measurement results within the Chinese Web. First, we show that the amount of virtual assets traded on this underground market is huge. Second, our research proofs that a significant amount of websites within China's part of the Web are malicious: our measurements reveal that about 1.49% of the examined sites contain some kind of malicious content.

Some relevant news from heise.de:

China apparently remains the most popular refuge for malicious code on the internet. According to Sophos, the majority of infected websites are currently located there. Around 55 percent of all virus dispersers are in China, just under 20 percent in the US and just 11 percent in Russia. The latter figure is a little surprising, as a high proportion of online criminal activity is thought to be carried out by the Russian Business Network - at present, however, the RBN seems to be on the ropes. Nonetheless, the Russian share of infected websites has doubled since July 2007.

It seems botnets and malicious sites are everywhere. Oh dear.