A Novel Approach for Detecting DGA-Based Botnets in DNS Queries Using Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

In today’s security landscape, advanced threats are becoming increasingly difficult to detect as the pattern of attacks expands. Classical approaches that rely heavily on static matching, such as blacklisting or regular expression patterns, may be limited in flexibility or uncertainty in detecting malicious data in system data. This is where machine learning techniques can show their value and provide new insights and higher detection rates. The behavior of botnets that use domain-flux techniques to hide command and control channels was investigated in this research. The machine learning algorithm and text mining used to analyze the network DNS protocol and identify botnets were also described. For this purpose, extracted and labeled domain name datasets containing healthy and infected DGA botnet data were used. Data preprocessing techniques based on a text-mining approach were applied to explore domain name strings with n-gram analysis and PCA. Its performance is improved by extracting statistical features by principal component analysis. The performance of the proposed model has been evaluated using different classifiers of machine learning algorithms such as decision tree, support vector machine, random forest, and logistic regression. Experimental results show that the random forest algorithm can be used effectively in botnet detection and has the best botnet detection accuracy.