International Business Machines Corporation

Uwe Küllmar

Johannes Noll

Marc Noske

Mark Usher

Dirk Harz

Volker Vogeley

Markus Ludwig

Matthias Bartelt

Marc-André Isenberg

A method for identification of malicious domains is provided. The method extracts a set of domain information from one or more input streams. The set of domain information includes a set of domains and a set of domain characteristics describing each domain. The method clusters the set of domains to generate a set of campaign clusters of related domains. The clusters are based on the set of domain characteristics. The method modifies the set of campaign clusters with a set of threat intelligence ratings to generate a set of enriched campaign clusters. A portion of the set of threat intelligence ratings correspond to one or more domains within the set of campaign clusters. The method determines a cluster designation for each campaign cluster of the set of enriched campaign clusters and distributes the cluster designations for each campaign cluster to one or more threat intelligence resource.

Domain clustering for malicious campaign identification

A network-accessible cyber-threat security analytics service is configured to receive and respond to requests that originate as name queries to a Domain Name System (DNS) service. Threat intelligence information provided by the service is organized into threat intelligence zones that correspond to zones exposed via the DNS service. Upon receipt of a DNS query, the query having been generated by an application seeking access to threat intelligence data exposed by the service, the query is translated into a DNS zone-specific API request based on the type of threat intelligence information sought. The zone-specific API request is then used to retrieve the requested threat intelligence information from a threat intelligence database. The requested threat intelligence information is then returned to the application by being encoded as part of a response to the DNS query. In this manner, the DNS protocol is leverage to facilitate highly-efficient access and retrieval of threat intelligence information.

Threat intelligence information access via a DNS protocol

Growing community of inventors

Kassel, Germany

Uwe Küllmar