Botnet Detection Using On-line Clustering with Pursuit Reinforcement Competitive Learning (PRCL)

Botnet is a malicious software that often occurs at this time, and can perform malicious activities, such as DDoS, spamming, phishing, keylogging, clickfraud, steal personal information and important data. Botnets can replicate themselves without user consent. Several systems of botnet detection has been done by using classification methods. Classification methods have high precision, but it needs more effort to determine appropiate classification model. In this paper, we propose reinforced approach to detect botnet with Online Clustering using Reinforcement Learning. Reinforcement Learning involving interaction with the environment and became new paradigm in machine learning. The reinforcement learning will be implemented with some rule detection, because botnet ISCX dataset is categorized as unbalanced dataset which have high range of each number of class. Therefore we implemented Reinforcement Learning to Detect Botnet using Pursuit Reinforcement Competitive Learning (PRCL) with additional rule detection which has reward and punisment rules to achieve the solution. Based on the experimental result, PRCL can detect botnet in real time with high accuracy (100% for Neris, 99.9% for Rbot, 78% for SMTP_Spam, 80.9% for Nsis, 80.7% for Virut, and 96.0% for Zeus) and fast processing time up to 176 ms. Meanwhile the step of CPU and memory usage which are 78 % and 4.3 GB for pre-processing, 34% and 3.18 GB for online clustering with PRCL, and 23% and 3.11 GB evaluation. The proposed method is one solution for network administrators to detect botnet which has unpredictable behavior in network traffic.