Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)
attacks are highly organized and are launched for prolonged periods.
APT attacks exhibit discernible attributes or patterns. In order to
maintain the command and control (c2) network redundant, APT attacks
are generally embedded with multiple DNS names. An intuitive view is
that APT attackers keep and control a high number of DNS-IP address
pairs. Most of existing malware attribution works placed great
emphasis on grouping the technological or behavioral contexts from
the malware binaries. 

Frankie Li studied a small sample of malware from a
specific victim group who had been subjected to APT attacks. The study indicates that the attackers follow some behavioral patterns of
registering DNS domains and the frequently use of stable DNS-IP
pairs. The gatherings of such evidence regarding malware binaries are
not complicated. But it requires tedious online queries of open
source information. 

The team developed an automated solution to simplify
the tasks of collecting and storing the information as a database for
future analysis. Once the initial set of malicious DNS-IP pair,
“parked domain” and “whois information” are
identified; the database can be called to perform updates manually.
This database can be used for further analysis by a visualization
tool, and for identification of the possible identity or personas of
the attackers. In the study Maltego was used for analysis.

Frankie Li had presented his work at Blackhat, USA 2014.