Runze Zhang (Georgia Institute of Technology), Mingxuan Yao (Georgia Institute of Technology), Haichuan Xu (Georgia Institute of Technology), Omar Alrawi (Georgia Institute of Technology), Jeman Park (Kyung Hee University), Brendan Saltaformaggio (Georgia Institute of Technology)

For decades, law enforcement and commercial entities have attempted botnet takedowns with mixed success. These efforts, relying on DNS sink-holing or seizing C&C infrastructure, require months of preparation and often omit the cleanup of left-over infected machines. This allows botnet operators to push updates to the bots and re-establish their control. In this paper, we expand the goal of malware takedowns to include the covert and timely removal of frontend bots from infected devices. Specifically, this work proposes seizing the malware's built-in update mechanism to distribute crafted remediation payloads. Our research aims to enable this necessary but challenging remediation step after obtaining legal permission. We developed ECHO, an automated malware forensics pipeline that extracts payload deployment routines and generates remediation payloads to disable or remove the frontend bots on infected devices. Our study of 702 Android malware shows that 523 malware can be remediated via ECHO's takedown approach, ranging from covertly warning users about malware infection to uninstalling the malware.

View More Papers

Cellular Metasploit

Dr. Yongdae Kim, Director, KAIST Chair Professor, Electrical Engineering and GSIS, KAIST

Read More

Passive Inference Attacks on Split Learning via Adversarial Regularization

Xiaochen Zhu (National University of Singapore & Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Xinjian Luo (National University of Singapore & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence), Yuncheng Wu (Renmin University of China), Yangfan Jiang (National University of Singapore), Xiaokui Xiao (National University of Singapore), Beng Chin Ooi (National University of Singapore)

Read More

On-demand RFID: Improving Privacy, Security, and User Trust in...

Youngwook Do (JPMorganChase and Georgia Institute of Technology), Tingyu Cheng (Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Notre Dame), Yuxi Wu (Georgia Institute of Technology and Northeastern University), HyunJoo Oh(Georgia Institute of Technology), Daniel J. Wilson (Northeastern University), Gregory D. Abowd (Northeastern University), Sauvik Das (Carnegie Mellon University)

Read More

Poster: Understanding User Acceptance of Privacy Labels: Barriers and...

Jingwen Yan (Clemson University), Mohammed Aldeen (Clemson University), Jalil Harris (Clemson University), Kellen Grossenbacher (Clemson University), Aurore Munyaneza (Texas Tech University), Song Liao (Texas Tech University), Long Cheng (Clemson University)

Read More