Analyzing Endpoints in the Internet of Things Malware

Abstract: The lack of security measures in the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their persistent online connectivity give adversaries an opportunity to target them or abuse them as intermediary targets for larger attacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) campaigns. In this paper, we analyze IoT malware with a focus on endpoints to understand the affinity between the dropzones and their target IP addresses, and to understand the different patterns among them. Towards this goal, we reverse-engineer 2,423 IoT malware samples to obtain IP addresses. We further augment additional information about the endpoints from Internet-wide scanners, including Shodan and Censys. We then perform a deep data-driven analysis of the dropzones and their target IP addresses and further examine the attack surface of the target device space.