  Nowadays, malware campaigns have reached a high level of sophistication,
thanks to the use of cryptography and covert communication channels over
traditional protocols and services. In this regard, a typical approach to evade
botnet identification and takedown mechanisms is the use of domain fluxing
through the use of Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs). These algorithms
produce an overwhelming amount of domain names that the infected device tries
to communicate with to find the Command and Control server, yet only a small
fragment of them is actually registered. Due to the high number of domain
names, the blacklisting approach is rendered useless. Therefore, the botmaster
may pivot the control dynamically and hinder botnet detection mechanisms. To
counter this problem, many security mechanisms result in solutions that try to
identify domains from a DGA based on the randomness of their name.
  In this work, we explore hard to detect families of DGAs, as they are
constructed to bypass these mechanisms. More precisely, they are based on the
use of dictionaries so the domains seem to be user-generated. Therefore, the
corresponding generated domains pass many filters that look for, e.g. high
entropy strings. To address this challenge, we propose an accurate and
efficient probabilistic approach to detect them. We test and validate the
proposed solution through extensive experiments with a sound dataset containing
all the wordlist-based DGA families that exhibit this behaviour and compare it
with other state-of-the-art methods, practically showing the efficacy and
prevalence of our proposal.

Cryptography and Security