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An Analysis of the iKee.B iPhone Botnet

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Abstract

We present an analysis of the iKee.B (duh) Apple iPhone bot client, captured on November 25, 2009. The bot client was released throughout several countries in Europe, with the initial purpose of coordinating its infected iPhones via a Lithuanian botnet server. This report details the logic and function of iKee’s scripts, its configuration files, and its two binary executables, which we have reverse engineered to an approximation of their C source code implementation. The iKee bot is one of the latest offerings in smartphone malware, in this case targeting jailbroken iPhones. While its implementation is simple in comparison to the latest generation of PC-based malware, its implications demonstrate the potential extension of crimeware to this valuable new frontier of handheld consumer devices.

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© 2010 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Porras, P., Saïdi, H., Yegneswaran, V. (2010). An Analysis of the iKee.B iPhone Botnet. In: Schmidt, A.U., Russello, G., Lioy, A., Prasad, N.R., Lian, S. (eds) Security and Privacy in Mobile Information and Communication Systems. MobiSec 2010. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 47. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17502-2_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17502-2_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17501-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17502-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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