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Innovative Botnet Communication Analysis and Reverse Engineering Techniques

Networks of compromised computers controlled by a central server, better known as botnets, are a Swiss Army knife of tools for online criminals. Hackers can use these co-opted systems to churn out spam, host malicious code, hide their tracks on the Internet, or flood a corporate network to cut off its access to the Web.. Whenever a new botnet appears, researchers race to reverse engineer the software it installs on a victim's machine, and to decode the way each bot communicates with the controlling server. Because these communications are often encrypted, such analyses can take weeks or months. Now researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University have created a way to automatically reverse engineer the communications between compromised computers and their controlling servers. In a paper to be presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Computer and Communications Security, the researchers show how automatic reverse engineering can decipher the structure and purpose of the communications between a command-and-control server and its bots. The link for this article located at Technology Review is no longer available. . Whenever a new botnet appears, researchers race to reverse engineer the software it installs on a vi. networks, compromised, computers, controlled, central, server, better, known, botnets. . Alex

Nov 13, 2009 • Alex Network Security