X-swarm: The upcoming swarm worm

Abstract

With the rapid growth of technology in the digital landscape, cybercriminals attempt to utilize new and sophisticated techniques to autonomous and increase the speed and scale of their attacks. Meanwhile, the Dark Web infrastructures such as Tor, plays a crucial role in the criminal underground, especially for malware developers’ communities. It is logical to expect that the malicious actors would utilize the combination of these techniques in shortcoming time. To better understand the upcoming threat, in this manuscript, we investigate the design and mitigation of such malware. Accordingly, we introduce X-sWarm, which will be the next generation of resilient, stealthy malware that leverages the intelligent technique and the darknet infrastructures. Furthermore, we show that with the self-healing network mechanism, X-sWarm can achieve a low diameter and a low degree and be robust to partitioning under node removal. More importantly, we suggest the mitigation technique that neutralizes the nodes of the proposed worm.