A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
The Black Mark beside My Name Server: Exploring the Importance of Name Server IP Addresses in Malware DNS Graphs
Authors: Jukka Ruohonen, Sanja Skepanovic, Sami Hyrynsalmi, Igor Mishkovski, Tuomas Aura, Ville Leppänen
Editors: Muhammad Younas, Irfan Awan, Joyce El Haddad
Conference name: Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops
Publication year: 2016
Book title : 2016 IEEE 4th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW) (2016)
First page : 264
Last page: 269
Number of pages: 6
ISBN: 978-1-5090-3947-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/W-FiCloud.2016.61
Web address : http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/W-FiCloud.2016.61
This short exploratory empirical paper examines a question of how important the Internet protocol (IP) addresses of name servers are in linking together Internet domains that have distributed malware or otherwise having been associated with malicious computer networks. By using the domain name system (DNS) for building a relational representation, the found importance is elaborated with a dataset comprised of nearly sixty thousand domains. Besides the empirical exploration related to these domains, the paper provides a stylized discussion on the construction of empirical DNS graphs, including the concrete reduction and learning of the observed malware graph. With these two deliverables, the paper contributes to the active research field of DNS mining, further pinpointing a number of relevant research challenges for applications of complex network analysis for studying computer networking and cyber security.