SMSBotHunter: A Novel Anomaly Detection Technique to Detect SMS Botnets

Over the past few years, botnets have emerged as one of the most serious cybersecurity threats faced by individuals and organizations. After infecting millions of servers and workstations worldwide, botmasters have started to develop botnets for mobile devices. Mobile botnets use different mediums to communicate with their botmasters. Although significant research has been done to detect mobile botnets that use the Internet as their command and control (C&C) channel, little research has investigated SMS botnets per se. In order to fill this gap, in this paper, we first divide SMS botnets based on their characteristics into three families, namely, info stealer, SMS stealer, and SMS spammer. Then, we propose SMSBotHunter, a novel anomaly detection technique that detects SMS botnets using textual and behavioral features and one-class classification. We experimentally evaluate the detection performance of SMSBotHunter by simulating the behavior of human users and SMS botnets. The experimental results demonstrate that most of the SMS messages sent or received by info stealer and SMS spammer botnets can be detected using textual features exclusively. It is also revealed that behavioral features are crucial for the detection of SMS stealer botnets and will improve the overall detection performance.