Title
Exposure: A Passive DNS Analysis Service to Detect and Report Malicious Domains
Abstract
A wide range of malicious activities rely on the domain name service (DNS) to manage their large, distributed networks of infected machines. As a consequence, the monitoring and analysis of DNS queries has recently been proposed as one of the most promising techniques to detect and blacklist domains involved in malicious activities (e.g., phishing, spam, botnets command-and-control, etc.). EXPOSURE is a system we designed to detect such domains in real time, by applying 15 unique features grouped in four categories. We conducted a controlled experiment with a large, real-world dataset consisting of billions of DNS requests. The extremely positive results obtained in the tests convinced us to implement our techniques and deploy it as a free, online service. In this article, we present the Exposure system and describe the results and lessons learned from 17 months of its operation. Over this amount of time, the service detected over 100K malicious domains. The statistics about the time of usage, number of queries, and target IP addresses of each domain are also published on a daily basis on the service Web page.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2584679
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur.
Keywords
DocType
Volume
controlled experiment,DNS query,Exposure system,online service,DNS request,Passive DNS Analysis Service,domain name service,Report Malicious Domains,service Web page,real time,malicious domain,malicious activity
Journal
16
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1094-9224
52
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.88
18
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Leyla Bilge191143.78
Sevil Sen2924.68
Davide Balzarotti32040113.64
Engin Kirda45386334.12
Christopher Kruegel58799516.05