A Practical Analysis on Mirai Botnet Traffic

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are one of the biggest threats to the availability of Internet services. Behind these attacks are Botnets, such as Mirai, which exploits default and weak security credentials to take control of the host and spreads itself to other devices. This paper demonstrates a Mirai traffic analysis based on DNS heavy-hitters streams and Mirai scanning patterns by simulating an attack and the extraction of traffic data. The Mirai Command-and-Control (CnC) traffic as well as its scanning traffic are analyzed in a local Testbed composed of six ASUS Tinker Board devices (RaspberryPi like devices) cluster nodes and a MikroTik’s RouterOS to route traffic in different internal networks. In addition to the analysis of traffic flow patterns a real-time mitigation is demonstrated in the experiments.