Title:

BotSwindler: Tamper Resistant Injection of Believable Decoys in VM-Based Hosts for Crimeware Detection

Author(s):

Bowen, Brian M.
Prabhu, Pratap
Kemerlis, Vasileios
Sidiroglou, Stelios
Keromytis, Angelos D.
Stolfo, Salvatore

Date:

2010

Type:

Technical reports

Department:

Computer Science

Permanent URL:

http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:10504

Series:

Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports

Part Number:

CUCS-007-10

Publisher:

Department of Computer Science, Columbia University

Publisher Location:

New York

Abstract:

We introduce BotSwindler, a bait injection system designed to delude and detect crimeware by forcing it to reveal itself during the exploitation of monitored information. Our implementation of BotSwindler relies upon an out-of-host software agent to drive user-like interactions in a virtual machine, seeking to convince malware residing within the guest OS that it has captured legitimate credentials. To aid in the accuracy and realism of the simulations, we introduce a low overhead approach, called virtual machine verification, for verifying whether the guest OS is in one of a predefined set of states. We provide empirical evidence to show that BotSwindler can be used to induce malware into performing observable actions and demonstrate how this approach is superior to that used in other tools. We present results from a user study to illustrate the believability of the simulations and show that financial bait information can be used to effectively detect compromises through experimentation with real credential-collecting malware.

Subject(s):

Computer science

Item views:

343

Metadata:

description

View | Download