Botnet Detection via Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

The botnet is a serious network security threat that can cause servers crash, so how to detect the behavior of Botnet has already become an important part of the research of network security. DNS(Domain Name System) request is the first step for most of the mainframe computers controlled by Botnet to communicate with the C&C(command and control) server. The detection of DNS request domain names is an important way for mainframe computers controlled by Botnet. However, the detection method based on fixed rules is hard to take effect for botnet based on DGA(Domain Generation Algorithm) because malicious domain names keep evolving and derive many different generation methods. Contrasted with the traditional methods, the method based on machine learning is a better way to detect it by learning and modeling the DGA. This paper presents a method based on the Naive Bayes model, the XGBoost model, the SVM(Support Vector Machine) model, and the MLP(Multi-Layer Perceptron) model, and tests it with real data sets collected from DGA, Alexa, and Secrepo. The experimental results show the precision score, the recall score, and the F1 score for each model.