A First Step towards Characterizing Stealthy Botnets

Botnets have become a top cyber threat. Existing studies on botnets have mainly focused on showing how to exploit certain characteristics of existing botnets to detect them. However, such detection mechanisms could be defeated by stealthy botnets that are designed to evade them. Therefore, it is important to understand the power of stealthy botnets so as to answer questions such as: What kinds of stealth techniques can survive what kinds of detection mechanisms? Towards the ultimate goal, this paper makes a first step with the aim to build fundamental understandings of stealthy botnet command and control (C&C).