DNS Traffic Analysis for Malicious Domains Detection

The web has become the medium of choice for people to search for information, conduct business, and enjoy entertainment. At the same time, the web has also become the primary platform used by miscreants to attack users. For example, drive-by-download attacks, which could be through malicious domains, are a popular choice among bot herders to grow their botnets. In this paper we present our methodology for detecting any connection to malicious domain. Our detection method is based on a blacklist of malicious domains. We process the network traffic, particularly DNS traffic. We analyze all DNS requests and match the query with the blacklist. The blacklist of malicious domains is updated automatically and the detection is in the real time. We applied our methodology on a packet capture (pcap) file which contains traffic to malicious domains and we proved that our methodology can successfully detect the connections to malicious domains. We also applied our methodology on campus live traffic and showed that it can detect malicious domain connections in the real time.