Researchers look for novel methods to defeat botnets

Dr. Narasimha Reddy, the J.W. Runyon, Jr. '35 Professor I in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, had his research featured in ACM magazine, Communications of the ACM.

A botnet, or robot network, is a term used to describe a collection of computers that have been compromised by a worm or Trojan horse, allowing an attacker to remotely control the infected systems. Victims are typically unaware that they are infected or that their system is being controlled remotely by a botnet administrator.

Reddy, in collaboration with his students Sandeep Yadav and Ashwath Reddy at Texas A&M and Supranamaya "Soups" Ranjan with Narus Inc., came up with a method of detecting botnets such as Conficker, Kraken and Torpig that use so-called DNS domain-fluxing for their command and control (C&C) infrastructure.

Their work, along with other researchers', was the topic of the article, "The War Against Botnets," which describes several novel methods of defeating these botnets.

Communications of the ACM is the leading print and online publication for the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery). Read by computing's leading professionals worldwide, Communications of the ACM is recognized as one of the most trusted and knowledgeable source of industry information for today's computing professional.

Download a copy of the article here.