Characterisation of the Kelihos.B Botnet

Abstract

Botnets are organized networks of infected computers that are used for malicious purposes. An example is Kelihos.B, a botnet of the Kelihos family used primarily for mining bitcoins, sending spam and stealing bitcoin wallets. A large part of the Kelihos.B botnet was sink- holed in early 2012 and since then bots are sending requests to controlled servers. In this paper, we analyze and characterize the behavior of Keli- hos.B. Our analysis is based on the log file of the bot request logged at the sinkhole from March 2012 to early November 2013. We investigate both the overall characteristics of the botnets, as well as on its evolu- tion over time since the time of the sinkholing. Our results indicate that, although this trend is decreasing, there are possibly still newly infected bots even more than a year from the original sinkholing.

Publication
8th IFIP WG 6.6 International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management, and Security (AIMS 2014)