Your botnet is my botnet

TLDR

Botnets are malware‑infected machine networks controlled by adversaries that cause many Internet security problems, and Torpig is a sophisticated bot that harvests sensitive information such as bank and credit card data. The authors seized control of the Torpig botnet and monitored its operations for ten days. During that period they observed more than 180 000 infections, collected almost 70 GB of data, and linked unique bot infections to over 1.2 million IP addresses. These observations revealed the botnet’s large size, diverse application targets, and rich personal data theft, offering new insight into the type and amount of information stolen by botnets.

Abstract

Botnets, networks of malware-infected machines that are controlled by an adversary, are the root cause of a large number of security problems on the Internet. A particularly sophisticated and insidious type of bot is Torpig, a malware program that is designed to harvest sensitive information (such as bank account and credit card data) from its victims. In this paper, we report on our efforts to take control of the Torpig botnet and study its operations for a period of ten days. During this time, we observed more than 180 thousand infections and recorded almost 70 GB of data that the bots collected. While botnets have been hijacked and studied previously, the Torpig botnet exhibits certain properties that make the analysis of the data particularly interesting. First, it is possible (with reasonable accuracy) to identify unique bot infections and relate that number to the more than 1.2 million IP addresses that contacted our command and control server. Second, the Torpig botnet is large, targets a variety of applications, and gathers a rich and diverse set of data from the infected victims. This data provides a new understanding of the type and amount of personal information that is stolen by botnets.