A Survey on Fast-flux Attacks

“Fast-flux” refers to rapidly assigning different IP addresses to the same domain name. Although there are some legitimate uses for this technique, recently it has become a favorite tool for cyber criminals to launch collaborative attacks. After it was first observed by Honeynet, it was reported that fast-flux has been used in phishing, malware spreading, spam, and other malicious activities linked to criminal organizations. Combining with peer-to-peer networking, distributed command and control, web-based load balancing, and proxy redirection, fast-flux makes Internet attacks more resistant to discovery and counter-measure. This article aims at giving a comprehensive survey on fast-flux attacks. Some important issues including technical background, classification, characterization, measurement and detection, and mitigation are discussed. Challenges of detecting and mitigating fast-flux attack are also pointed out.