@inproceedings{788f7b1fb2104d46bc122c3d70423c94,
title = "Stegobot: a covert social network botnet",
abstract = "We propose Stegobot, a new generation botnet that communicates over probabilistically unobservable communication channels. It is designed to spread via social malware attacks and steal information from its victims. Unlike conventional botnets, Stegobot traffic does not introduce new communication endpoints between bots. Instead, it is based on a model of covert communication over a social-network overlay - bot to botmaster communication takes place along the edges of a social network. Further, bots use image steganography to hide the presence of communication within image sharing behavior of user interaction. We show that it is possible to design such a botnet even with a less than optimal routing mechanism such as restricted flooding. We analyzed a real-world dataset of image sharing between members of an online social network. Analysis of Stegobot's network throughput indicates that stealthy as it is, it is also functionally powerful - capable of channeling fair quantities of sensitive data from its victims to the botmaster at tens of megabytes every month.",
keywords = "social network, online social network, image steganography, stego image, covert channel, behavioral research, communication, network routing, computer aided network analysis",
author = "Shishir Nagaraja and Amir Houmansadr and Pratch Piyawongwisal and Vijit Singh and Pragya Agarwal and Nikita Borisov",
year = "2011",
month = sep,
day = "26",
doi = "10.1007/978-3-642-24178-9_21",
language = "English",
isbn = "9783642241772",
volume = "6958 ",
series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)",
publisher = "Springer",
pages = "299--313",
editor = "{Filler }, T. and {Pevn{\'y} }, T. and {Craver }, S. and {Ker }, A.",
booktitle = "Information Hiding - 13th International Conference, IH 2011, Revised Selected Papers",
note = "13th International Conference on Information Hiding, IH 2011 ; Conference date: 18-05-2011 Through 20-05-2011",
}