Advance Persistent Threat: Botnet

Growth of internet era and corporate sector dealings communication online has introduced crucial security challenges in cyber space. Statistics of recent large scale attacks defined new class of threat to online world, advanced persistent threat (APT) able to impact national security and economic stability of any country. From all APTs, botnet is one of the well-articulated and stealthy attacks to perform cybercrime. Botnet owners and their criminal organizations are continuously developing innovative ways to infect new targets into their networks and exploit them. The concept of botnet refers collection of compromised computers (bots) infected by automated software robots, that interact to accomplish some distributed task which run without human intervention for illegal purposes. They are mostly malicious in nature and allow cyber criminals to control the infected machines remotely without the victim's knowledge. They use various techniques, communication protocols and topologies in different stages of their lifecycle; also specifically they can upgrade their methods at any time. Botnet is global in nature and their target is to steal or destroy valuable information from organizations as well as individuals. In this paper we present real world botnet (APTs) survey.