• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.1445-1462
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• 2012

While botnets are used for various malicious activities, it is well known that they are widely used for email spam. Though the spam filtering systems currently in use block IPs that send email spam, simply blocking the IPs of zombie PCs participating in a botnet is not enough to prevent the spamming activities of the botnet because these IPs can easily be changed or manipulated. This IP blocking is also insufficient to prevent crimes other than spamming, as the botnet can be simultaneously used for multiple purposes. For this reason, we propose a system that detects botnets and zombie PCs based on email spam analysis. This study introduces the concept of "group pollution level" - the degree to which a certain spam group is suspected of being a botnet - and "IP pollution level" - the degree to which a certain IP in the spam group is suspected of being a zombie PC. Such concepts are applied in our system that detects botnets and zombie PCs by grouping spam mails based on the URL links or attachments contained, and by assessing the pollution level of each group and each IP address. For empirical testing, we used email spam data collected in an "email spam trap system" - Korea's national spam collection system. Our proposed system detected 203 botnets and 18,283 zombie PCs in a day and these zombie PCs sent about 70% of all the spam messages in our analysis. This shows the effectiveness of detecting zombie PCs by email spam analysis, and the possibility of a dramatic reduction in email spam by taking countermeasure against these botnets and zombie PCs.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.101-115
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• 2011

A botnet is a huge network of hacked zombie PCs. Recognizing the fact that the majority of email spam is sent out by botnets, a system that is capable of detecting botnets and zombie PCS will be designed in this study by analyzing email spam. In this study, spam data collected in "an email spam trail system", Korea's national spam collection system, were used for analysis. In this study, we classified the spam groups by the URLs or attached files, and we measured how much the group has the characteristics of botnet and how much the IPs have the characteristics of zombie PC. Through the simulation result in this study, we could extract 16,030 zombie suspected PCs for one hours and it was verified that email spam can provide considerably useful information in tracing zombie PCs.

• Journal of Platform Technology
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.3-17
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• 2021

Advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks are attacks aimed at a particular entity as a set of latent and persistent computer hacking processes. These APT attacks are usually carried out through various methods, including spam mail and disguised banner advertising. The same name is also used for files, since most of them are distributed via spam mail disguised as invoices, shipment documents, and purchase orders. In addition, such Infostealer attacks were the most frequently discovered malicious code in the first week of February 2021. CDR is a 'Content Disarm & Reconstruction' technology that can prevent the risk of malware infection by removing potential security threats from files and recombining them into safe files. Gartner, a global IT advisory organization, recommends CDR as a solution to attacks in the form of attachments. There is a program using CDR techniques released as open source is called 'Dangerzone'. The program supports the extension of most document files, but does not support the extension of HWP files that are widely used in Korea. In addition, Gmail blocks malicious URLs first, but it does not block malicious URLs in mail systems such as Naver and Daum, so malicious URLs can be easily distributed. Based on this problem, we developed a 'Dangerzone' program that supports the HWP extension to prevent APT attacks, and a Chrome extension that performs URL checking in Naver and Daum mail and blocking banner ads.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.27-33
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• 2019

One of serious security threats is a botnet-based attack. A botnet in general consists of numerous bots, which are computing devices with networking function, such as personal computers, smartphones, or tiny IoT sensor devices compromised by malicious codes or attackers. Such botnets can launch various serious cyber-attacks like DDoS attacks, propagating mal-wares, and spreading spam e-mails over the network. To establish a botnet, attackers usually inject malicious URLs into web source codes stealthily by using data hiding methods like Javascript obfuscation techniques to avoid being discovered by traditional security systems such as Firewall, IPS(Intrusion Prevention System) or IDS(Intrusion Detection System). Meanwhile, it is non-trivial work in practice for software developers to manually find such malicious URLs which are hidden in numerous web source codes stored in web servers. In this paper, we propose a security defense system to discover such suspicious, malicious URLs hidden in web source codes, and present experiment results that show its discovery performance. In particular, based on our experiment results, our proposed system discovered 100% of URLs hidden by Javascript encoding obfuscation within sample web source files.