Cyber Times International Journal of Technology & Management

Botnets are one of the major threat areas against cyber security with a wide variety of malicious applications including spam, phishing, distributed denial of service, password cracking and many more. Botnets are being increasingly used to perform a range of offensive activities without the knowledge of the victim. They use various topologies, communication protocols and techniques at several stages of their lifecycle. Therefore, identification of botnets is a challenge since they can change their methodology at any instant. This paper focuses on the working technology of botnets, and the mechanisms to detect botnets by examining the network flow characteristics using machine learning techniques.