nicter: a large-scale network incident analysis system: case studies for understanding threat landscape

We have been developing the Network Incident analysis Center for Tactical Emergency Response (nicter), whose objective is to detect and identify propagating malwares. The nicter mainly monitors darknet, a set of unused IP addresses, to observe global trends of network threats, while it captures and analyzes malware executables. By correlating the network threats with analysis results of malware, the nicter identifies the root causes (malwares) of the detected network threats. Through a long-term operation of the nicter for more than five years, we have achieved some key findings that would help us to understand the intentions of attackers and the comprehensive threat landscape of the Internet. With a focus on a well-knwon malware, i. e., W32.Downadup, this paper provides some practical case studies with considerations and consequently we could obtain a threat landscape that more than 60% of attacking hosts observed in our dark-net could be infected by W32.Downadup. As an evaluation, we confirmed that the result of the correlation analysis was correct in a rate of 86.18%.