On the Robustness of the Botnet Topology Formed by Worm Infection

Peer-to-peer botnets formed by worm infection have become a real threat to the Internet and are expected to become rampant in the near future. In the authors' previous work, they have analyzed the underlying botnet topology formed by worm infection, without considering potential user defenses. In this paper, they extend the study to characterize the evolution of the botnet structure when users patch or clean part of infected hosts after all vulnerable machines are compromised. Specifically, they examine the number of peers of an infected host and the size of disconnected botnets under random node removal through simulation.