Using Behavioral Similarity for Botnet Command-and-Control Discovery

Malware authors and operators typically collaborate to achieve the optimal profit. They also frequently change their behavior and resources to avoid detection. The authors propose a social similarity metrics that exploits these relationships to improve the effectiveness and stability of the threat propagation algorithm typically used to discover malicious collaboration. Furthermore, they propose behavioral modeling as a way to group similarly behaving servers, enabling extension of the ground truth that's so expensive to obtain in the field of network security. The authors also show that seeding the threat propagation algorithm from a set of coherently behaving servers (instead of from a single known malicious server identified by threat intelligence) makes the algorithm far more effective and significantly more robust, without compromising the precision of findings.