• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.704-719
• /
• 2024

Botnet pandemics are becoming more prevalent with the growing use of mobile phone technologies. Mobile phone technologies provide a wide range of applications, including entertainment, commerce, education, and finance. In addition, botnet refers to the collection of compromised devices managed by a botmaster and engaging with each other via a command server to initiate an attack including phishing email, ad-click fraud, blockchain, and much more. As the number of botnet attacks rises, detecting harmful activities is becoming more challenging in handheld devices. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate mobile botnet assaults to find the security vulnerabilities that occur through coordinated command servers causing major financial and ethical harm. For this purpose, we propose a hybrid analysis approach that integrates permissions and API and experiments on the machine-learning classifiers to detect mobile botnet applications. In this paper, the experiment employed benign, botnet, and malware applications for validation of the performance and accuracy of classifiers. The results conclude that a classifier model based on a simple decision tree obtained 99% accuracy with a low 0.003 false-positive rate than other machine learning classifiers for botnet applications detection. As an outcome of this paper, a hybrid approach enhances the accuracy of mobile botnet detection as compared to static and dynamic features when both are taken separately.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.14 no.6
• /
• pp.2591-2611
• /
• 2020

Botnets have become one of the most significant threats to Internet-connected smartphones. A botnet is a combination of infected devices communicating through a command server under the control of botmaster for malicious purposes. Nowadays, the number and variety of botnets attacks have increased drastically, especially on the Android platform. Severe network disruptions through massive coordinated attacks result in large financial and ethical losses. The increase in the number of botnet attacks brings the challenges for detection of harmful software. This study proposes a smart framework for mobile botnet detection using static analysis. This technique combines permissions, activities, broadcast receivers, background services, API and uses the machine-learning algorithm to detect mobile botnets applications. The prototype was implemented and used to validate the performance, accuracy, and scalability of the proposed framework by evaluating 3000 android applications. The obtained results show the proposed framework obtained 98.20% accuracy with a low 0.1140 false-positive rate.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.17 no.5
• /
• pp.1310-1338
• /
• 2023

As Internet of Things (IoT) applications and devices rapidly grow, cyber-attacks on IoT networks/systems also have an increasing trend, thus increasing the threat to security and privacy. Botnet is one of the threats that dominate the attacks as it can easily compromise devices attached to an IoT networks/systems. The compromised devices will behave like the normal ones, thus it is difficult to recognize them. Several intelligent approaches have been introduced to improve the detection accuracy of this type of cyber-attack, including deep learning and machine learning techniques. Moreover, dimensionality reduction methods are implemented during the preprocessing stage. This research work proposes deep Autoencoder dimensionality reduction method combined with Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier as botnet detection system for IoT networks/systems. Experiments were carried out using 3- layer, 4-layer and 5-layer pre-processing data from the MedBIoT dataset. Experimental results show that using a 5-layer Autoencoder has better results, with details of accuracy value of 99.72%, Precision of 99.82%, Sensitivity of 99.82%, Specificity of 99.31%, and F1-score value of 99.82%. On the other hand, the 5-layer Autoencoder model succeeded in reducing the dataset size from 152 MB to 12.6 MB (equivalent to a reduction of 91.2%). Besides that, experiments on the N_BaIoT dataset also have a very high level of accuracy, up to 99.99%.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
• /
• v.33 no.2
• /
• pp.267-280
• /
• 2023

With development of computing and communications technologies, IoT environments based on high-speed networks have been extending rapidly. Especially, from home to an office or a factory, applications of IoT devices with sensing environment and performing computations are increasing. Unfortunately, IoT devices which have limited hardware resources can be vulnerable to cyber attacks. Hence, there is a concern that an IoT botnet can give rise to information leakage as a national cyber security crisis arising from abuse as a malicious waypoint or propagation through connected networks. In order to response in advance from unknown cyber threats in IoT networks, in this paper, We firstly define four types of We firstly define four types of characteristics by analyzing darknet traffic accessed from an IoT botnet. Using the characteristic, a suspicious IP address is filtered quickly. Secondly, the filtered address is identified by Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) or Open Source INTelligence (OSINT) in terms of an unknown suspicious host. The identified IP address is finally fingerprinted to determine whether the IP is a malicious host or not. To verify a validation of the proposed method, we apply to a Darknet on real-world SOC. As a result, about 1,000 hosts who are detected and blocked preemptively by the proposed method are confirmed as real IoT botnets.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.22 no.3
• /
• pp.55-64
• /
• 2015

We propose statistical methods for evaluating the efficiency of CAPTCHA. Most people unfairly assumed that machines are not capable at reading precisely. This fact leads to the invention of CAPTCHA, a distorted word or short phase, which is designed to thwart computers and separate human from machines. However, advances in image recognition technologies mean that machines are constantly getting better at recognizing CAPTCHA. This forces CAPTCHA designers to design even more difficult CAPTCHAs to prevent their systems from being gamed by malicious bots. However, this arm race has an unintended side effect on the common users. Many CAPTCHAs are now so hard that many people are unable to read them. This obviously conflicts with the original purpose that CAPTCHA was invented in the first place. Our analysis shows that some CAPTCHAs are more users friendly. In particular, Yahoo-style CAPTCHA is the most friendliness. This suggests that a good CAPTCHA could be a simple text with some distortion that prevents machines from correctly segmenting characters.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.8 no.5
• /
• pp.1801-1816
• /
• 2014

Because HTTP-related ports are allowed through firewalls, they are an obvious point for launching cyber attacks. In particular, malware uses HTTP protocols to communicate with their master servers. We call this an HTTP-based command and control (C&C) server. Most previous studies concentrated on the behavioral pattern of C&Cs. However, these approaches need a well-defined white list to reduce the false positive rate because there are many benign applications, such as automatic update checks and web refreshes, that have a periodic access pattern. In this paper, we focus on finding new discriminative features of HTTP-based C&Cs by analyzing HTTP activity sets. First, a C&C shows a few connections at a time (low density). Second, the content of a request or a response is changed frequently among consecutive C&Cs (high content variability). Based on these two features, we propose a novel C&C analysis mechanism that detects the HTTP-based C&C. The HAS-Analyzer can classify the HTTP-based C&C with an accuracy of more than 96% and a false positive rate of 1.3% without using any white list.