Benign network entities based malicious campaign signature generation

Abstract

A signature generator has been designed that can create a malicious campaign signature with substantial coverage of malicious campaign behavior without impeding benign traffic. The malicious campaign signature generator uses data of multiple, known malicious campaigns to identify abused, benign network entities. The signature generator builds a graph data structure for each malicious campaign that represents the abused network entities. The relationships encoded in the graph data structure indicate the use of the combination of abused network entities in the campaign. The signature generator aggregates the graph data structures and identifies a combination of the benign network entities that were highly abused across the multiple malicious campaigns with respect to all of the abused network entities represented in the graph data structures. A signature is then created from the identifiers of this combination of highly abused network entities.