Don't Let One Rotten Apple Spoil the Whole Barrel
Daiping Liu, Zhou Li, Kun Du, Haining Wang, Baojun Liu, Haixin Duan · 2017
Domain names have been exploited for illicit online activities for decades. In the past, miscreants mostly registered new domains for their attacks. However, the domains registered for malicious purposes can be deterred by existing reputation and blacklisting systems. In response to the arms race, miscreants have recently adopted a new strategy, called domain shadowing, to build their attack infrastructures. Specifically, instead of registering new domains, miscreants are beginning to compromise legitimate ones and spawn malicious subdomains under them. This has rendered almost all existing countermeasures ineffective and fragile because subdomains inherit the trust of their apex domains, and attackers can virtually spawn an infinite number of shadowed domains.