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Detection of Malicious Domains in APT via Mining Massive DNS Logs

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Machine Learning for Cyber Security (ML4CS 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12486))

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Abstract

With the rise of network attack, advanced persistent threats (APT) imposes severe challenges to network security. Since APT attacker can easily hide inevitable C&C traffic in massive Web traffic, HTTP-based C&C communication has become the most preferred method, providing us with new ideas for detecting. Moreover, under the assumption that attackers have limited attack resources, the domains used in the same attack will show relevance. Although there has been a lot of works focused on APT detection, it is still a difficult task to detect the abnormal DNS activity from massive Web traffic. In this paper, we propose a new framework based belief propagation to identify suspicious domains and compromised hosts in APT. We extract the domains features and calculate the score of being malicious from the DNS logs with minimal ground truth. We implement and validate our framework on anonymous DNS logs released by LANL. The experiment shows that our approach identifies previously unknown malicious domains and achieves high detection rates.

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Acknowledgement

This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2016QY06X1205.

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Correspondence to Lu Huang .

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Huang, L., Xue, J., Han, W., Kong, Z., Niu, Z. (2020). Detection of Malicious Domains in APT via Mining Massive DNS Logs. In: Chen, X., Yan, H., Yan, Q., Zhang, X. (eds) Machine Learning for Cyber Security. ML4CS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12486. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62223-7_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62223-7_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62222-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62223-7

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