Detecting Malware Domains: A Cyber-Threat Alarm System

© 2018, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. Throughout the years, hackers’ intentions’ varied from curiosity, to financial gains, to political statements. Armed with their botnets, bot masters could crash a server or website. Statistics show that botnet activity accounts for 29% of the Internet traffic. But how can bot masters establish undetected communication with their botnets? The answer lies in the Domain Name System (DNS), using which hackers host their own domain and assign to it changing IP addresses to avoid being detected. In this paper, we propose a multi-factor cyber-threat detection system that relies on DNS traffic analysis for the detection of malicious domains. The proposed system was implemented, and tested, and the results yielded are very promising