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Android Botnets: What URLs are Telling Us

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Book cover Network and System Security (NSS 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9408))

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Abstract

Botnets have traditionally been seen as a threat to personal computers; however, the recent shift to mobile platforms resulted in a wave of new botnets. Due to its popularity, Android mobile Operating System became the most targeted platform. In spite of rising numbers, there is a significant gap in understanding the nature of mobile botnets and their communication characteristics. In this paper, we address this gap and provide a deep analysis of Command and Control (C&C) and built-in URLs of Android botnets detected since the first appearance of the Android platform. By combining both static and dynamic analyses with visualization, we uncover the relationships between the majority of the analyzed botnet families and offer an insight into each malicious infrastructure. As a part of this study we compile and offer to the research community a dataset containing 1929 samples representing 14 Android botnet families.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada

    Andi Fitriah Abdul Kadir, Natalia Stakhanova & Ali Akbar Ghorbani

Authors
  1. Andi Fitriah Abdul Kadir
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  2. Natalia Stakhanova
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  3. Ali Akbar Ghorbani
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andi Fitriah Abdul Kadir .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Apt. 2A, NEW YORK, New York, USA

    Meikang Qiu

  2. University of Texas, San Antonio, Texas, USA

    Shouhuai Xu

  3. Dept. of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA

    Moti Yung

  4. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Haibo Zhang

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Abdul Kadir, A.F., Stakhanova, N., Ghorbani, A.A. (2015). Android Botnets: What URLs are Telling Us. In: Qiu, M., Xu, S., Yung, M., Zhang, H. (eds) Network and System Security. NSS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9408. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25645-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25645-0_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25644-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25645-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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