A Analytical Survey on Botnet and Detection Methods

Botnets have recently been identified as one of the most important and emerging threats to the security with hundreds of millions of computers compromised and infected in cyber space. Botnets are a network of compromised hosts or bots that are under the control of an attacker. They are considered as a primary root-cause for most of the attacks and fraudulent activities on the Internet, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, phishing, spamming, information theft, and so on. Some studies show that about between 16 to 25 percent of computers which are connected to the internet all over the world are infected by bots and controlled by attackers. This pape, discusses in detail about Botnet and related research including Botnet evolution, life-cycle, command and control models, communication protocols, Botnet detection methods, Botnet mechanisms and their models, possible attacks performed by various types of Botnet. This paper also discusses the prominent research problems that have remained open and could be continued by researches.