Detecting Domain-Flux Malware Using DNS Failure Traffic

Domain-Flux malware is hard to detect because of the variable C&C (Command and Control) domains which were randomly generated by the technique of domain generation algorithm (DGA). In this paper, we propose a Domain-Flux malware detection approach based on DNS failure traffic. The approach fully leverages the behavior of DNS failure traffic to recognize nine features, and then mines the DGA-generated domains by a clustering algorithm and determinable rules. Theoretical analysis and experimental results verify its efficiency with both test dataset and real-world dataset. On the test dataset, our approach can achieve a true positive rate of 99.82% at false positive rate of 0.39%. On the real-world dataset, the approach can also achieve a relatively high precision of 98.3% and find out 197,026 DGA domains by analyzing DNS traffic in campus network for seven days. We found 1213 hosts of Domain-Flux malware existing on campus network, including the known Conficker, Fosniw and several new Domain-Flux malwares that have never been reported before. We classified 197,026 DGA domains and gave the representative generated patterns for a better understanding of the Domain-Flux mechanism.