NEMESYS: Enhanced Network Security for Seamless Service Provisioning in the Smart Mobile Ecosystem

As a consequence of the growing popularity of smart mobile devices, mobile malware is clearly on the rise, with attackers targeting valuable user information and exploiting vulnerabilities of the mobile ecosystems. With the emergence of large-scale mobile botnets, smartphones can also be used to launch attacks on mobile networks. The NEMESYS project will develop novel security technologies for seamless service provisioning in the smart mobile ecosystem, and improve mobile network security through better understanding of the threat landscape. NEMESYS will gather and analyze information about the nature of cyber-attacks targeting mobile users and the mobile network so that appropriate counter-measures can be taken. We will develop a data collection infrastructure that incorporates virtualized mobile honeypots and a honeyclient, to gather, detect and provide early warning of mobile attacks and better understand the modus operandi of cyber-criminals that target mobile devices. By correlating the extracted information with the known patterns of attacks from wireline networks, we will reveal and identify trends in the way that cyber-criminals launch attacks against mobile devices.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS'13); 9 pages; 1 figur

Characterizing the IRC-based Botnet Phenomenon

Botnets, networks of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker, are one of the most common attack platforms nowadays. They can, for example, be used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal sensitive information, or send spam emails. A long-term measurement study of botnet activities is useful as a basis for further research on global botnet mitigation and disruption techniques. We have built a distributed and fully-automated botnet measurement system which allows us to collect data on the botnet activity we observe in China. Based on the analysis of tracking records of 3,290 IRC-based botnets during a period of almost twelve months, this paper presents several novel results of botnet activities which can only be measured via long-term measurements. These include. amongst others, botnet lifetime, botnet discovery trends and distributions, command and control channel distributions, botnet size and end-host distributions. Furthermore, our measurements confirm and extend several previous results from this area. Our results show that the botnet problem is of global scale, with a scattered distribution of the control infrastructure and also a scattered distribution of the victims. Furthermore, the control infrastructure itself is rather flexible, with an average lifetime of a Command \& Control server of about 54 days. These results can also leverage research in the area of botnet detection, mitigation, and disruption: only by understanding the problem in detail, we can develop efficient counter measures

Studying Malicious Websites and the Underground Economy on the Chinese Web

The World Wide Web gains more and more popularity within China with more than 1.31 million websites on the Chinese Web in June 2007. Driven by the economic profits, cyber criminals are on the rise and use the Web to exploit innocent users. In fact, a real underground black market with thousand of participants has developed which brings together malicious users who trade exploits, malware, virtual assets, stolen credentials, and more. In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of this underground black market and present a model to describe the market. We substantiate our model with the help of measurement results within the Chinese Web. First, we show that the amount of virtual assets traded on this underground market is huge. Second, our research proofs that a significant amount of websites within China’s part of the Web are malicious: our measurements reveal that about 1.49% of the examined sites contain some kind of malicious content

Malware Distributed Collection And Pre-classification System Using Honeypot Technology

Malware has become a major threat in the last years due to the ease of spread through the Internet. Malware detection has become difficult with the use of compression, polymorphic methods and techniques to detect and disable security software. Those and other obfuscation techniques pose a problem for detection and classification schemes that analyze malware behavior. In this paper we propose a distributed architecture to improve malware collection using different honeypot technologies to increase the variety of malware collected. We also present a daemon tool developed to grab malware distributed through spam and a pre-classification technique that uses antivirus technology to separate malware in generic classes. © 2009 SPIE.7344Grossman, J., Niedzialkowski, T.C., Hacking Intranet Websites from the Outside - Javascript malware just got a lot more dangerous (2006) Black Hat, , http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bhusa-06/BH-US-06-Grossman.pdf, USA, Las Vegas, Available atWhitehouse, O., An Analysis of Address Space Layout Randomization on Windows Vista (2007) Symantec Advanced Threat Research, , http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/reference/Address-Space-Layout-Randomization.pdf, White paper available atWhitehouse, O., Analysis of GS Protections in Microsoft Windows Vista (2007) Symantec Advanced Threat Research, , http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/reference/GS-Protections-in-Vista.pdf, White paper available atMcDermott, J., Fox, C., Using abuse cases models for security requirement analysis (1999) Proceedings of the 15th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, p. 55. , IEEE Computer Society, ISBN:0-7695-0346-2Collection, , http://Nepenthes.carnivore.it, Available at:, Accessed on January 2009Baecher, P., The Nepenthes Platform: An Efficient Approach to Collect Malware (2006) Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, pp. 165-184. , Springer Berlin, HeidelbergHoneytrap, , http://honeytrap.mwcollect.org, Available at:, Accessed on January 2009Zhuge, J., Holz, T., Han, X., Song, C., Zou, W., Collecting Autonomous Spreading Malware Using Highinteraction Honeypots (2007) Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS'07), , Zhengzhou, China, DecemberProvos, N., Holz, T., (2007) Virtual Honeypots: From Botnet Tracking to Intrusion Detection, , Addison Wesley, ISBN: 0-321-33632-1Seifert, C., Welch, I., Komisarczuk, P., HoneyC - The Low-Interaction Client Honeypot (2007) Proceedings of the 2007 NZCSRCS, , Waikato University, Hamilton, New Zealand, AprilNazario, J., Phoneyc, , http://svn.carnivore.it/browser/phoneyc, Accessed on January 2009Seifert, C., Steenson, R., Holz, T., Yuan, B., Davis, M.A., Know Your Enemy: Malicious Web Servers, , http://www.honeynet.org/papers/mws, Available at:, Accessed on January 2009Spitzner, L., (2002) Honeypots: Tracking Hackers, , Addison Wesley, ISBN: 0-321-10895-1http://www.honeypots-alliance.org.br, Brazilian Honeypots Alliance, Distributed Honeypots Project. Available at:, Accessed on January 200

Tracking and Mitigation of Malicious Remote Control Networks

Attacks against end-users are one of the negative side effects of today’s networks. The goal of the attacker is to compromise the victim’s machine and obtain control over it. This machine is then used to carry out denial-of-service attacks, to send out spam mails, or for other nefarious purposes. From an attacker’s point of view, this kind of attack is even more efficient if she manages to compromise a large number of machines in parallel. In order to control all these machines, she establishes a "malicious remote control network", i.e., a mechanism that enables an attacker the control over a large number of compromised machines for illicit activities. The most common type of these networks observed so far are so called "botnets". Since these networks are one of the main factors behind current abuses on the Internet, we need to find novel approaches to stop them in an automated and efficient way. In this thesis we focus on this open problem and propose a general root cause methodology to stop malicious remote control networks. The basic idea of our method consists of three steps. In the first step, we use "honeypots" to collect information. A honeypot is an information system resource whose value lies in unauthorized or illicit use of that resource. This technique enables us to study current attacks on the Internet and we can for example capture samples of autonomous spreading malware ("malicious software") in an automated way. We analyze the collected data to extract information about the remote control mechanism in an automated fashion. For example, we utilize an automated binary analysis tool to find the Command & Control (C&C) server that is used to send commands to the infected machines. In the second step, we use the extracted information to infiltrate the malicious remote control networks. This can for example be implemented by impersonating as a bot and infiltrating the remote control channel. Finally, in the third step we use the information collected during the infiltration phase to mitigate the network, e.g., by shutting down the remote control channel such that the attacker cannot send commands to the compromised machines. In this thesis we show the practical feasibility of this method. We examine different kinds of malicious remote control networks and discuss how we can track all of them in an automated way. As a first example, we study botnets that use a central C&C server: We illustrate how the three steps can be implemented in practice and present empirical measurement results obtained on the Internet. Second, we investigate botnets that use a peer-to-peer based communication channel. Mitigating these botnets is harder since no central C&C server exists which could be taken offline. Nevertheless, our methodology can also be applied to this kind of networks and we present empirical measurement results substantiating our method. Third, we study fast-flux service networks. The idea behind these networks is that the attacker does not directly abuse the compromised machines, but uses them to establish a proxy network on top of these machines to enable a robust hosting infrastructure. Our method can be applied to this novel kind of malicious remote control networks and we present empirical results supporting this claim. We anticipate that the methodology proposed in this thesis can also be used to track and mitigate other kinds of malicious remote control networks

Web attack risk awareness with lessons learned from high interaction honeypots

Tese de mestrado, Segurança Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2009Com a evolução da web 2.0, a maioria das empresas elabora negócios através da Internet usando aplicações web. Estas aplicações detêm dados importantes com requisitos cruciais como confidencialidade, integridade e disponibilidade. A perda destas propriedades influencia directamente o negócio colocando-o em risco. A percepção de risco providencia o necessário conhecimento de modo a agir para a sua mitigação. Nesta tese foi concretizada uma colecção de honeypots web de alta interacção utilizando diversas aplicações e sistemas operativos para analisar o comportamento do atacante. A utilização de ambientes de virtualização assim como ferramentas de monitorização de honeypots amplamente utilizadas providencia a informação forense necessária para ajudar a comunidade de investigação no estudo do modus operandi do atacante, armazenando os últimos exploits e ferramentas maliciosas, e a desenvolver as necessárias medidas de protecção que lidam com a maioria das técnicas de ataque. Utilizando a informação detalhada de ataque obtida com os honeypots web, o comportamento do atacante é classificado entre diferentes perfis de ataque para poderem ser analisadas as medidas de mitigação de risco que lidam com as perdas de negócio. Diferentes frameworks de segurança são analisadas para avaliar os benefícios que os conceitos básicos de segurança dos honeypots podem trazer na resposta aos requisitos de cada uma e a consequente mitigação de risco.With the evolution of web 2.0, the majority of enterprises deploy their business over the Internet using web applications. These applications carry important data with crucial requirements such as confidentiality, integrity and availability. The loss of those properties influences directly the business putting it at risk. Risk awareness provides the necessary know-how on how to act to achieve its mitigation. In this thesis a collection of high interaction web honeypots is deployed using multiple applications and diverse operating systems in order to analyse the attacker behaviour. The use of virtualization environments along with widely used honeypot monitoring tools provide the necessary forensic information that helps the research community to study the modus operandi of the attacker gathering the latest exploits and malicious tools and to develop adequate safeguards that deal with the majority of attacking techniques. Using the detailed attacking information gathered with the web honeypots, the attacking behaviour will be classified across different attacking profiles to analyse the necessary risk mitigation safeguards to deal with business losses. Different security frameworks commonly used by enterprises are analysed to evaluate the benefits of the honeypots security concepts in responding to each framework’s requirements and consequently mitigating the risk

Honey-copy : a concept and prototype of a generic honeypot system

In this paper, we present Honey-Copy, a concept and prototype for a honeypot system that can pinpoint modifications caused by attacks or intrusion for any honeypot. To achieve this, we track modifications without having to install any additional tools on them. We make use of cloning to identify whether or not a modification has been caused by the honeypot itself or an attacker or intruder. We briefly present our initial prototype and discuss the challenges to be solved toward a more complete and feature rich version of our prototype

Creating Convincing Industrial-Control-System Honeypots

Cyberattacks on industrial control systems (ICSs) can be especially damaging since they often target critical infrastructure. Honeypots are valuable network-defense tools, but they are difficult to implement for ICSs because they must then simulate more than familiar protocols. This research compared the performance of the Conpot and GridPot honeypot tools for simulating nodes on an electric grid for live (not recorded) traffic. We evaluated the success of their deceptions by observing their activity types and by scanning them. GridPot received a higher rate of traffic than Conpot, and many visitors to both were deceived as to whether they were dealing with a honeypot. We also tested Shodan’s Honeyscore for finding honeypots, and found it was fooled by our honeypots as well as others when, like most users, it did not take site history into account. This is good news for collecting useful attack intelligence with ICS honeypots

Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability