Runze Zhang (Georgia Institute of Technology), Mingxuan Yao (Georgia Institute of Technology), Haichuan Xu (Georgia Institute of Technology), Omar Alrawi (Georgia Institute of Technology), Jeman Park (Kyung Hee University), Brendan Saltaformaggio (Georgia Institute of Technology)

For decades, law enforcement and commercial entities have attempted botnet takedowns with mixed success. These efforts, relying on DNS sink-holing or seizing C&C infrastructure, require months of preparation and often omit the cleanup of left-over infected machines. This allows botnet operators to push updates to the bots and re-establish their control. In this paper, we expand the goal of malware takedowns to include the covert and timely removal of frontend bots from infected devices. Specifically, this work proposes seizing the malware's built-in update mechanism to distribute crafted remediation payloads. Our research aims to enable this necessary but challenging remediation step after obtaining legal permission. We developed ECHO, an automated malware forensics pipeline that extracts payload deployment routines and generates remediation payloads to disable or remove the frontend bots on infected devices. Our study of 702 Android malware shows that 523 malware can be remediated via ECHO's takedown approach, ranging from covertly warning users about malware infection to uninstalling the malware.

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Ran Elgedawy (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville), John Sadik (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Anuj Gautam (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Trinity Bissahoyo (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Christopher Childress (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Jacob Leonard (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Clay Shubert (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Scott Ruoti (The University of Tennessee,…

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Jiawen Zhang (Zhejiang University), Xinpeng Yang (Zhejiang University), Lipeng He (University of Waterloo), Kejia Chen (Zhejiang University), Wen-jie Lu (Zhejiang University), Yinghao Wang (Zhejiang University), Xiaoyang Hou (Zhejiang University), Jian Liu (Zhejiang University), Kui Ren (Zhejiang University), Xiaohu Yang (Zhejiang University)

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