From throw-away traffic to bots: detecting the rise of DGA-based malware

Abstract

Many botnet detection systems employ a blacklist of known command and control (C&C) domains to detect bots and block their traffic. Similar to signature-based virus detection, such a botnet detection approach is static because the blacklist is updated only after running an external (and often manual) process of domain discovery. As a response, botmasters have begun employing domain generation algorithms (DGAs) to dynamically produce a large number of random domain names and select a small subset for actual C&C use. That is, a C&C domain is randomly generated and used for a very short period of time, thus rendering detection approaches that rely on static domain lists ineffective. Naturally, if we know how a domain generation algorithm works, we can generate the