Mining botnet coordinated attacks using Apriori-Prefixspan hybrid algorithm

Abstract

This paper aims to detect features of coordinated attacks by applying data mining techniques, namely Apriori with PrefixSpan, to the CCC DATAset 2008-2010, which comprises captured packet data and downloading logs. Data mining algorithms enable us to automate the detection of characteristics in large amounts of data, which conventional heuristics cannot deal with. Apriori achieves a high recall but with false positives, whereas PrefixSpan has high precision but low recall. We therefore propose a hybrid of these two algorithms. Our analysis shows a change in the behavior of malware over the past three years. © 2013 Information Processing Society of Japan.