An Empirical Study on Flow-based Botnet Attacks Prediction: NIST Technical Note 2111

Today, NIST is publishing NIST Technical Note (TN) 2111, An Empirical Study on Flow-based Botnet Attacks Prediction. In the era of the Internet of Things, botnet threats are rising, which has prompted many studies on botnet detection and measurement. In contrast, this study aims to predict botnet attacks, such as massive spam emails and distributed denial-of-service attacks. To that end, this empirical study presents a prediction method for botnet attacks. The method leverages measurement of command and control (C2) activities and automated labeling by associating C2 with attacks. The method was evaluated using a large-scale, real-world, and long-term dataset. We hope our work will help develop further countermeasures against botnets and contribute to internet security.