Because of the advances in Internet technology, the applications of the Internet of Things have become a crucial topic. The number of mobile devices used globally substantially increases daily; therefore, information security concerns are increasingly vital. The botnet virus is a major threat to both personal computers and mobile devices; therefore, a method of botnet feature characterization is proposed in this study. The proposed method is a classified model in which an artificial fish swarm algorithm and a support vector machine are combined. A LAN environment with several computers which has infected by the botnet virus was simulated for testing this model; the packet data of network flow was also collected. The proposed method was used to identify the critical features that determine the pattern of botnet. The experimental results indicated that the method can be used for identifying the essential botnet features and that the performance of the proposed method was superior to that of genetic algorithms.

Rapid advances in information and communication technology have made ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things popular and practicable. These applications create enormous volumes of data, which are available for analysis and classification as an aid to decision-making. Among the classification methods used to deal with big data, feature selection has proven particularly effective. One common approach involves searching through a subset of the features that are the most relevant to the topic or represent the most accurate description of the dataset. Unfortunately, searching through this kind of subset is a combinatorial problem that can be very time consuming. Meaheuristic algorithms are commonly used to facilitate the selection of features. The artificial fish swarm algorithm (AFSA) employs the intelligence underlying fish swarming behavior as a means to overcome optimization of combinatorial problems. AFSA has proven highly successful in a diversity of applications; however, there remain shortcomings, such as the likelihood of falling into a local optimum and a lack of multiplicity. This study proposes a modified AFSA (MAFSA) to improve feature selection and parameter optimization for support vector machine classifiers. Experiment results demonstrate the superiority of MAFSA in classification accuracy using subsets with fewer features for given UCI datasets, compared to the original FASA.

Feature selection is a search process to find the optimal feature subset to describe the characteristics of dataset exactly. Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm is a novel meta-heuristic search algorithm, which can solve the problem of optimization by simulate the behaviors of fish swarm. This study proposes a modified version of Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm to select the optimal feature subset to improve the classification accuracy for Support Vector Machines. The empirical results showed that the performance of the proposed method was superior to that of basic version of Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm.