MONDEO: Multistage Botnet Detection
Duarte Dias Bruno Sousa Nuno Antunes
Mobile devices have widespread to become the most used piece of technology.
Due to their characteristics, they have become major targets for botnet-related
malware. FluBot is one example of botnet malware that infects mobile devices.
In particular, FluBot is a DNS-based botnet that uses Domain Generation
Algorithms (DGA) to establish communication with the Command and Control Server
(C2). MONDEO is a multistage mechanism with a flexible design to detect
DNS-based botnet malware. MONDEO is lightweight and can be deployed without
requiring the deployment of software, agents, or configuration in mobile
devices, allowing easy integration in core networks. MONDEO comprises four
detection stages: Blacklisting/Whitelisting, Query rate analysis, DGA analysis,
and Machine learning evaluation. It was created with the goal of processing
streams of packets to identify attacks with high efficiency, in the distinct
phases. MONDEO was tested against several datasets to measure its efficiency
and performance, being able to achieve high performance with RandomForest
classifiers. The implementation is available at github.