MONDEO: Multistage Botnet Detection

Abstract

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.