Botnets are the preeminent source of online crime and arguably the greatest threat to the Internet infrastructure. In this paper, we present ZombieCoin, a botnet command-and-control (C&C) mecha- nism that runs on the Bitcoin network. ZombieCoin offers considerable advantages over existing C&C techniques, most notably the fact that Bitcoin is designed to resist the very regulatory processes currently used to combat botnets. We believe this is a desirable avenue botmasters may explore in the near future and our work is intended as a first step towards devising effective countermeasures.
['Syed Taha Ali', 'Patrick McCorry', 'Peter Hyun-Jeen Lee', 'Feng Hao']
ZombieCoin: Powering Next-Generation Botnets with Bitcoin