Botnet in DDoS Attacks: Trends and Challenges

Threats of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have been increasing day-by-day due to rapid development of computer networks and associated infrastructure, and millions of software applications, large and small, addressing all varieties of tasks. Botnets pose a major threat to network security as they are widely used for many Internet crimes such as DDoS attacks, identity theft, email spamming, and click fraud. Botnet based DDoS attacks are catastrophic to the victim network as they can exhaust both network bandwidth and resources of the victim machine. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of DDoS attacks, their causes, types with a taxonomy, and technical details of various attack launching tools. A detailed discussion of several botnet architectures, tools developed using botnet architectures, and pros and cons analysis are also included. Furthermore, a list of important issues and research challenges is also reported.