Botnets, and the cybercriminal underground

Abstract

An underground community of cyber criminals has grown in recent years with powerful technologies capable of inflicting serious economic and infrastructural harm in the digital age. This paper serves as an introduction to the world of botnets and to the efforts of the nonprofit group “The ShadowServer Foundation” to track them. A data mining exploration is performed on ShadowServer’s datasets to investigate possible classification mechanisms for threat assessment.