Current techniques to monitor botnets towards disruption or takedown are likely to result in inaccurate data gathered about the botnet or be detected by C&C orchestrators. Seeking a covert and scalable solution, we look to an evolving pattern in modern malware that integrates standardized over-permissioned protocols, exposing privileged access to C&C servers. We implement techniques to detect and exploit these protocols from over-permissioned bots toward covert C&C server monitoring. Our empirical study of 200k malware captured since 2006 revealed 62,202 over-permissioned bots (nearly 1 in 3) and 443,905 C&C monitoring capabilities, with a steady increase of over-permissioned protocol use over the last 15 years. Due to their ubiquity, we conclude that even though over-permissioned protocols allow for C&C server infiltration, the efficiency and ease of use they provide continue to make them prevalent in the malware operational landscape. This paper presents C3PO, a pipeline that enables our study and empowers incident responders to automatically identify over-permissioned protocols, infiltration vectors to spoof bot-to-C&C communication, and C&C monitoring capabilities that guide covert monitoring post infiltration. Our findings suggest the over-permissioned protocol weakness provides a scalable approach to covertly monitor C&C servers, which is a fundamental enabler of botnet disruptions and takedowns.

Over 55% of the world's websites run on Content Management Systems (CMS). Unfortunately, this huge user population has made CMS-based websites a high-profile target for hackers. Worse still, the vast majority of the website hosting industry has shifted to a "backup and restore" model of security, which relies on error-prone AV scanners to prompt users to roll back to a pre-infection nightly snapshot. This research had the opportunity to study these nightly backups for over 300,000 unique production websites. In doing so, we measured the attack landscape of CMS-based websites and assessed the effectiveness of the backup and restore protection scheme. To our surprise, we found that the evolution of tens of thousands of attacks exhibited clear long-lived multi-stage attack patterns. We now propose TARDIS, an automated provenance inference technique, which enables the investigation and remediation of CMS-targeting attacks based on only the nightly backups already being collected by website hosting companies. With the help of our industry collaborator, we applied TARDIS to the nightly backups of those 300K websites and found 20,591 attacks which lasted from 6 to 1,694 days, some of which were still yet to be detected.