Walowdac - Analysis of a Peer-to-Peer Botnet

A botnet is a network of compromised machines under the control of an attacker. Botnets are the driving force behind several misuses on the Internet, for example spam mails or automated identity theft. In this paper, we study the most prevalent peer-to-peer botnet in 2009: Waledac. We present our in ltration of the Waledac botnet, which can be seen as the successor of the Storm Worm botnet. To achieve this we implemented a clone of the Waledac bot named Walowdac. It implements the communication features of Waledac but does not cause any harm, i.e., no spam emails are sent and no other commands are executed. With the help of this tool we observed a minimum daily population of 55,000 Waledac bots and a total of roughly 390,000 infected machines throughout the world. Furthermore, we gathered internal information about the success rates of spam campaigns and newly introduced features like the theft of cre- dentials from victim machines.