Centralized botnets are easy targets for takedown efforts by computer security researchers and law enforcement. Thus, botnet controllers have sought new ways to harden the infrastructures of their botnets. In order to meet this objective, some botnet operators have (re)designed their botnets to use Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructures. Many P2P botnets are far more resilient to takedown attempts than centralized botnets, because they have no single points of failure. However, P2P botnets are subject to unique classes of attacks, such as node enumeration and poisoning. In this paper, we introduce a formal graph model to capture the intrinsic properties and fundamental vulnerabilities of P2P botnets. We apply our model to current P2P botnets to assess their resilience against attacks. We provide assessments on the sizes of all eleven active P2P botnets, showing that some P2P botnet families contain over a million bots. In addition, we have prototyped several mitigation strategies to measure the resilience of existing P2P botnets. We believe that the results from our analysis can be used to assist security researchers in evaluating mitigation strategies against current and future P2P botnets.
Zeus is a family of credential-stealing trojans which originally appeared in 2007. The first two variants of Zeus are based on centralized command servers. These command servers are now routinely tracked and blocked by the security community. In an apparent effort to withstand these routine countermeasures, the second version of Zeus was forked into a peer-to-peer variant in September 2011. Compared to earlier versions of Zeus, this peer-to-peer variant is fundamentally more difficult to disable. Through a detailed analysis of this new Zeus variant, we demonstrate the high resilience of state of the art peer-to-peer botnets in general, and of peer-to-peer Zeus in particular.
Carrier's book File System Forensic Analysis is one of the most comprehensive sources when it comes to the forensic analysis of file systems. Published in 2005, it provides details about the most commonly used file systems of that time as well as a process model to analyze file systems in general. The Sleuth Kit is the implementation of Carrier's model and it is still widely used during forensic analyses today—standalone or as a basis for forensic suites such as Autopsy. While The Sleuth Kit is still actively maintained, the model has not seen any updates since then. Moreover, there is no support for modern file systems implementing new paradigms such as pooled storage. In this paper, we present an update to Carrier's model which enables the analysis of pooled storage file systems. To demonstrate that our model is suitable, we implemented it for ZFS—a file system for large scale storage, cloud, and virtualization environments—and show how to perform an analysis of this file system using our model and extended toolkit
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