Abstract
Botnets such as Conficker and Torpig utilize high entropy domains for fluxing and evasion. Bots may query a large number of domains, some of which may fail. In this paper, we present techniques where the failed domain queries (NXDOMAIN) may be utilized for: (i) Speeding up the present detection strategies which rely only on successful DNS domains. (ii) Detecting Command and Control (C&C) server addresses through features such as temporal correlation and information entropy of both successful and failed domains. We apply our technique to a Tier-1 ISP dataset obtained from South Asia, and a campus DNS trace, and thus validate our methods by detecting Conficker botnet IPs and other anomalies with a false positive rate as low as 0.02%. Our technique can be applied at the edge of an autonomous system for real-time detection.
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