Tracking botnets using automatically generated domains

Stefano Zanero is an Assistant Professor at Politechnico di Milano, where he focuses on systems security.

Modern botnets rely on domain-generation algorithms (DGAs) to build resilient command-and-control infrastructures that are difficult to track or deactivate. Considerable attention has been given to recognizing automatically generated domains (AGDs) from DNS traffic, in order to identify previously unknown AGDs, which helps in the task of disrupting botnets’ communication capabilities.

In this podcast recorded at the Hack In The Box 2013 conference in Kuala Lumpur, Zanero talks about his recent research that centered on identifying a new method to gather intelligence from passive DNS data, a source easily available to researchers.

Listen to the podcast here.