Analysis of botnets through life-cycle

Among all the existent threats to cybersecurity, botnets are clearly situated in the top list. As a consequence of this importance, the research community is enormously increasing its interest on this problem and the number of publications on botnets is exponentially growing in the last years. We perform an analysis of botnets aimed at giving order to all these research contributions. This analysis is different from the previous contributions because it considers the problem of botnets from a global perspective, and not only studying certain technical aspects like type of architecture, protocols or detection techniques. The starting point to do this is the own botnet life-cycle, understood as the sequence of stages that a botnet should successfully traverse in order to reach the success. As a consequence of our study, we have deducted that the interruption of any of the stages makes it possible to thwart a botnet purpose and, thus, make it useless.