ASP2P: An advanced botnet based on social networks over hybrid P2P

Botnets, regarded as the worms with fundamental command and control (C&C) channel, are becoming the typically frustrating threats to the Internet infrastructure. In order to defeat the botnets effectively, we should not only focus on known botnets, but also need to conduct some researches on the potential advanced botnets that could be developed by the adversary in the future. By investigating the vital C&C mechanism deeply, we present an advanced social peer-to-peer (ASP2P) botnet practically that combines the advantages of social networks and hybrid P2P structure in the way that bots receive encrypted commands from the social networks via HTTP and the C&C topology is hybrid peer-to-peer structure. ASP2P botnet, simulated on the PlanetLab testbed, is feasible and showed to be more covert and robust that it can be hardly detected and shut down compared with other P2P botnets.