Botnet Command and Control Mechanisms

Botnet is most widespread and occurs commonly in today's cyber attacks, resulting in serious threats to our network assets and organization's properties. Botnets are collections of compromised computers (Bots) which are remotely controlled by its originator (BotMaster) under a common commond-and-control (C & C) infrastructure. They are used to distribute commands to the Bots for malicious activities such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, sending large amount of SPAM and other nefarious purposes. Understanding the Botnet C & C channels is a critical component to precisely identify, detect, and mitigate the Botnets threats. Therefore, in this paper we provide a classification of Botnets C & C channels and evaluate well-known protocols (e.g. IRC, HTTP, and P2P) which are being used in each of them.