Spamming botnets

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on characterizing spamming botnets by leveraging both spam payload and spam server traffic properties. Towards this goal, we developed a spam signature generation framework called AutoRE to detect botnet-based spam emails and botnet membership. AutoRE does not require pre-classified training data or white lists. Moreover, it outputs high quality regular expression signatures that can detect botnet spam with a low false positive rate. Using a three-month sample of emails from Hotmail, AutoRE successfully identified 7,721 botnet-based spam campaigns together with 340,050 unique botnet host IP addresses. Our in-depth analysis of the identified botnets revealed several interesting findings regarding the degree of email obfuscation, properties of botnet IP addresses, sending patterns, and their correlation with network scanning traffic. We believe these observations are useful information in the design of botnet detection schemes.