A Learning Evasive Email-Based P2P-Like Botnet

Nowadays, machine learning is widely used in malware detection system as a core component. The machine learning algorithm is designed under the assumption that all datasets follow the same underlying data distribution. But the real-world malware data distribution is not stable and changes with time. By exploiting the knowledge of the machine learning algorithm and malware data concept drift problem, we show a novel learning evasive botnet architecture and a stealthy and secure C&C mechanism. Based on the email communication channel, we construct a stealthy email-based P2P-like botnet that exploit the excellent reputation of email servers and a huge amount of benign email communication in the same channel. The experiment results show horizontal correlation learning algorithm is difficult to separate malicious email traffic from normal email traffic based on the volume features and time-related features with enough confidence. We discuss the malware data concept drift and possible defense strategies.