A Multifaceted Approach to Understanding the Botnet Phenomenon

The academic community has long acknowledged the existence of malicious botnets, however to date, very little is known about the behavior of these distributed computing platforms. According to the authors, botnet behavior has never been methodically studied, botnet prevalence on the Internet is mostly a mystery, and the botnet life cycle has yet to be modeled. Uncertainty abounds. In this paper, the authors attempt to clear the fog surrounding botnets by constructing a multifaceted and distributed measurement infrastructure.