• 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.

• 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.37-44
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• 2011

Recently malicious activities that is a DDoS, spam, propagation of malware, steeling person information, phishing on the Internet are related malicious botnet. To detect malicious botnet, Many researchers study a detection system for malicious botnet, but these applies specific protocol, action or attack based botnet. In this reason, we study a selection of measurement to detec malicious botnet in this paper. we collect a traffic of malicious botnet and analyze it for feature of network traffic. And we select a feature based measurement. we expect to help a detection of malicious botnet through this study.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.47-55
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• 2009

Bot is a kind of worm/virus that is remotely controlled by a herder. Bot can be used to launch distributed denial-of-service(DDoS) attacks or send spam e-mails etc. Launching cyber attacks using malicious Bots is motivated by increased monetary gain which is not the objective of worm/virus. However, it is very difficult for infected user to detect this infection of Botnet which becomes more serious problems. This is why botnet is a dangerous, malicious program. The Bot DNS Sinkhole is a domestic bot mitigation scheme which will be proved in this paper as one of an efficient ways to prevent malicious activities caused by bots and command/control servers. In this paper, we analysis botnet activities over more than one-year period, including Bot's lifetime, Bot command/control server's characterizing. And we analysis more efficient ways to prevent botnet activities. We have showed that DNS sinkhole scheme is one of the most effective Bot mitigation schemes.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.1471-1492
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• 2015

The rapid development of smartphone technologies have resulted in the evolution of mobile botnets. The implications of botnets have inspired attention from the academia and the industry alike, which includes vendors, investors, hackers, and researcher community. Above all, the capability of botnets is uncovered through a wide range of malicious activities, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS), theft of business information, remote access, online or click fraud, phishing, malware distribution, spam emails, and building mobile devices for the illegitimate exchange of information and materials. In this study, we investigate mobile botnet attacks by exploring attack vectors and subsequently present a well-defined thematic taxonomy. By identifying the significant parameters from the taxonomy, we compared the effects of existing mobile botnets on commercial platforms as well as open source mobile operating system platforms. The parameters for review include mobile botnet architecture, platform, target audience, vulnerabilities or loopholes, operational impact, and detection approaches. In relation to our findings, research challenges are then presented in this domain.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.2881-2894
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• 2018

Cyber attacks are increasing continuously. On average about one million malicious codes appear every day, and attacks are expanding gradually to IT convergence services (e.g. vehicles and television) and social infrastructure (nuclear energy, power, water, etc.), as well as cyberspace. Analysis of large-scale cyber incidents has revealed that most attacks are started by PCs infected with malicious code. This paper proposes a method of detecting an attack IP automatically by analyzing the characteristics of the e-mail transfer path, which cannot be manipulated by the attacker. In particular, we developed a system based on the proposed model, and operated it for more than four months, and then detected 1,750,000 attack IPs by analyzing 22,570,000 spam e-mails in a commercial environment. A detected attack IP can be used to remove spam e-mails by linking it with the cyber removal system, or to block spam e-mails by linking it with the RBL(Real-time Blocking List) system. In addition, the developed system is expected to play a positive role in preventing cyber attacks, as it can detect a large number of attack IPs when linked with the portal site.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.18 no.6A
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• pp.107-114
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• 2008

The Bot is a kind of worm/virus that can be used to launch the distributed denial-of-service(DDoS) attacks or send massive amount of spam e-mails, etc. A lot of organizations make an effort to counter the Botnet's attacks. In Korea, we use DNS sinkhole system to protect from the Botnet's attack, while in Japan "so called" CCC(Cyber Clean Center) has been developed to protect from the Botnet's attacks. But in case of DNS sinkhole system, there is a problem since it cannot cure the Bot infected PCs themselves and in case of CCC there is a problem since only 30% of users with the Botnet-infected PCs can cooperate to cure themself. In this paper we propose a new method that prevent the Botnet's attacks and cure the Bot-infected PCs at the same time.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.51-61
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• 2009

Recently, the cyber-attacks using botnets are being increased, Because these attacks pursue the money, the criminal aspect is also being increased, There are spreading of spam mail, DDoS(Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, propagations of malicious codes and malwares, phishings. leaks of sensitive informations as cyber-attacks that used botnets. There are many studies about detection and mitigation techniques against centralized botnets, namely IRC and HITP botnets. However, P2P botnets are still in an early stage of their studies. In this paper, we analyzed the traffics of the Peacomm bot that is one of P2P-based storm bot by using honeynet which is utilized in active analysis of network attacks. As a result, we could see that the Peacomm bot sends a large number of UDP packets to the zombies in wide network through P2P. Furthermore, we could know that the Peacomm bot makes the scale of botnet maintained and extended through these results. We expect that these results are used as a basis of detection and mitigation techniques against P2P botnets.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.2689-2694
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• 2012

In recent years, cyber crimes were intended to get financial benefits through malicious attempts such as DDoS attacks, stealing financial information and spam. Botnets, a network composed of large pool of infected hosts, lead such malicious attacks. The botnets have adopted several evasion techniques and variations. Therefore, it is difficult to detect and eliminate them. Current botnet solutions use a signature based detection mechanism. Furthermore, the solutions cannot cover broad areas enough to detect world-wide botnets. In this paper, we propose IRC (Internet Relay Chat) that is used to control the botnet communication in a session channel of IRC servers connected through the analysis of the relationship of the channel and the connection with the server bot-infected hosts and how to detect.