Botnets represent a serious security threat on the Internet. Current security mechanism are typically inadequate for protecting against the latest breed of botnets, as botherders constantly develop new techniques and methods to frustrate investigators. Until recently, mobile networks have been relatively isolated from the Internet, so there has been little need for protecting against botnets. However, this situation is rapidly changing. With the rapid development of the computing and Internet access (i.e., using WiFi, GPRS and 3G) capabilities of smartphones, constructing practical mobile botnets has become an underlying trend. Thus, threats on the Internet most likely will migrate over to the mobile networks and vice versa. Botnets of malware injected into mobile devices will probably appear very soon, and there are already signs of this happening. This paper analyses the potential threat of botnets based on mobile networks. The study done will be further utilized for improving the performance of the developed “Efficient Generalized Forensics Framework for Mobile Devices”. To conclude our paper, we suggest possible defenses against the emerging threat

1. Norton. Bots and Botnets—A Growing Threat. Internet: http://us.norton.com/theme.jsp?themeid=botnet, read: 01.01.2012.
2. Graig A. Schiller, Jim Binkley with Gadi Evron, Carsten Willems, Tony Bradley, David Harley, and Michael Cross. Botnets: The Killer Web App. Andrew Williams, Syngress, 2007.
3. Kelly Jackson Higgins. Cellphone botnets, blackmailing voip and a healthy cybercrime economy. Darkreading, Oct 2008. http://www.darkreading.com/security/erabilities/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=211600782, read: 01.01.2012.
4. Lasse Trolle Borup. Peer to peer botnets: A case study on Waledac. Master’s thesis, Technical University of Denmark, Department of Informatics and Mathematical Modeling, System Security, Building 321, DK-2800, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark, 2009.
5. Gwena¨el Le Bodic. Mobile Messaging technologies and services. Wiley and Sons Ltd, Second Edition, 2005.
6. Sumit Kasera and Nishit Narang. 3G Mobile Networks. Architecture, Protocols and Procedure. Tata MCGraw-Hill Publishing Company, limited edition, 2005.
7. Ajay R. Mishra. Advanced cellular network planning and optimisation: 2G/2.5G/3G ... evolution to 4G. John Wiley and Sons, 2007.
8. Cui Xiang, Fang Binxing, Yin Lihua, Liu Xiaoyi, and Zang Tianning. Andbot: Towards Advanced Mobile Botnets. http://www.usenix.org/event/leet11/tech/full_papers/Xiang.pdf , read: 01.01.2012.
9. Axelle Apvrille. Symbian worm Yxes Towards mobile botnets. http://www.fortiguard.com/papers/EICAR2010_SymbianYxes_Towards-Mobile-Botnets.pdf, read: 01.01.2012.
10. P.A. Porras, H. Saidi, V. Yegneswaran, “An Analysis of the iKee.B iPhone Botnet,” in Proceedings of the 2nd International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy on Mobile Information and Communications Systems (Mobisec), May 2010
11. P. Traynor,M. Lin, M. Ongtang, V. Rao, T. Jaeger, T. La Porta and P. McDaniel, “On Cellular Botnets: Measuring the Impact of Malicious Devices on a Cellular Network Core,” in ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2009
12. Anne Ruste Flø and Audun Jøsang. Consequences of Botnets Spreading to Mobile Devices. Proceedings of the 14th Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems (NordSec 2009). Oslo, October 2009.
13. Suzanne Choney. Mobile giving to help Haiti exceeds $30 million,http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34850532/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/t/mobile-giving-help-haiti-exceeds-million/#.TwCVetSP-7Y, read: 01.01.2012.
14. W. Jansen and K. Scarfone. Computer security, guidelines on cell phone and pda security. Technical report, NIST- National Institute of standards and Technology, US Department of Commerce, 2008. Special Publication 800-124.
15. Jr Raphael. Botnet spam attacks to target cell phones. PC World, Internet, Oct 2008. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/101608-report-botnet-spam-attacks-to.html, read: 01.01.2012.
16. C. Mulliner, J.P. SeifertIn. Rise of the iBots: 0wning a telco network. In the Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software (Malware) Nancy, France 19-20 October, 2010.
17. P. Wang, S. Sparks et al. An advanced hybrid peer to peer botnet. Proc. of the HotBots’07, First Workshop on Hot Topics in Understanding Botnets, Cambridge, MA, 2007.
18. R. Vogt, J. Aycock, and M. Jacobson, “Army of botnets,” Proc. of 14th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’07), 2007.
19. R. Hund, M. Hamann and T. Holz. Towards Next-Generation Botnets. Proc. of the fourth European Conference on Computer Network Defense (EC2ND 08), 2008.
20. G. Starnberger, C. Kruegel, and E. Kirda, “Overbot - a botnet protocol based on kademlia,” in Proc. of the 4th Int. Conf. on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 08). September 2008.
21. Kapil Singh, Abhinav Srivastava et al. Evaluating Email’s Feasibility for Botnet Command and Control // Proceedings of The 38th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2008). Anchorage, Alaska. June 2008.
22. K. Singh, S. Sangal, N. Jain, P. Traynor and W.Lee, “Evaluating Bluetooth as a Medium for Botnet Command and Control,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA), July 2010.
23. Yuanyuan Zeng, Xin Hu, Kang G. Shin, “Design of SMS Commandedand-Controlled and P2P-Structured Mobile Botnet”, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121, U.S.A. 2009
24. Yan Zhang, Jun Zheng, and Miao Ma. Handbook of Research on Wireless Security. Idea Group Inc (IGI), 2008.
25. Irfan Asrar. Could sexy space be the birth of the sms botnet? Symantec, Internet blog, July 2009. http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/could-sexy-space-be-birth-sms-botnet, read: 01.01.2012.
26. Norman ASA. Mobile phone threats - hype or (finally) truth? Security Articles- Archive, 2009. http://www.norman.com/security_center/security_center_archive/2009/67174/en, read: 01.01.2012.Forman, G. 2003. An extensive empirical study of feature selection metrics for text classification. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 3 (Mar. 2003), 1289-1305.
27. Neal Leavitt. Mobile Security: Finally a Serious Problem?, 2011, http://www.leavcom.com/pdf/Mobilesecurity.pdf , read: 01.01.2012.
28. Jim Giles, Sneaky app shows potential for smartphone botnets, March 2010, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/03/mobile-botnets-threaten-smartp.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news, read: 01.01.2012

Botnet Security Threat Malware Mobile Devices Smartphone MobileForensics