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M. Neugschwandtner, P. Milani Comparetti, Ch. Platzer:
"Detecting malware's failover C&C strategies with SQUEEZE";
Vortrag: Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Orlando, Florida; 05.12.2011 - 09.12.2011; in: "Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference", ACM, 27 (2011), ISBN: 978-1-4503-0672-0.

The ability to remote-control infected PCs is a fundamental component of modern malware campaigns. At the same time, the command and control (C&C) infrastructure that provides this capability is an attractive target for mitigation. In recent years, more or less successful takedown operations have been conducted against botnets employing both client-server and peer-to-peer C&C architectures. To improve their robustness against such disruptions of their illegal business, botnet operators routinely deploy redundant C&C infrastructure and implement failover C&C strategies.

In this paper, we propose techniques based on multi-path exploration [1] to discover how malware behaves when faced with the simulated take-down of some of the network endpoints it communicates with. We implement these techniques in a tool called Squeeze, and show that it allows us to detect backup C&C servers, increasing the coverage of an automatically generated C&C blacklist by 19.7%, and can trigger domain generation algorithms that malware implements for disaster-recovery.

Malware

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2076732.2076736

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_206040.pdf