Today, botnets are still responsible for most large scale attacks on
the Internet. Botnets are versatile, they remain the most powerful
attack platform by constantly and continuously adopting new
techniques and strategies in the arms race against various detection
schemes, . Thus, it is essential to understand the latest of the
botnets in a timely manner so that the insights can be utilized in
developing more efficient defenses. In this work, we conduct a
measurement study on some of the most active botnets on the Internet
based on a public dataset collected over a period of seven
months by a monitoring entity. We first examine and compare the
attacking capabilities of different families of today’s active botnets.
Our analysis clearly shows that different botnets start to collaborate
when launching DDoS attacks.