# A Survey on Botnets: Incentives, Evolution, Detection and Current Trends
## 7 Current Trends and Challenges  
For the purpose of clarification, Table 10 below details a number of papers discussed in this section. The table denotes the overall topic, the overall trends within aforementioned topic, the relative interest for this specific trend, and a listing of all associated papers.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{p{113.8 pt} p{113.8 pt} p{113.8 pt}} \hline
**Trend** & **Topics Within Trend** & **Relative Interest** & **Papers** \\ \hline \multirow{7}{*}{Pervasive Computing} & Spread of botnets in home appliances & 2 out 18 papers listed. & [31; 201] \\ \cline{2-3}  & Spread of botnets in mobile phones & 2 out 18 papers listed. & [222; 223] \\ \cline{2-3}  & Spread of botnets in (non)-autonomous vehicles. & 2 out 18 papers listed. & [81; 198] \\ \cline{2-3}  & Remotely disrupting the controls of an autonomous vehicle. & 1 out of 18 papers listed. & [81] \\ \cline{2-3}  & Smartphones exploited via insufficient app certification process. & 2 out of 18 papers listed. & [37; 197] \\ \cline{2-3}  & Lack of restrictions hinders the process of avoiding botnet apps on mobile devices. & 2 out of 18 papers listed. & [207; 211] \\ \cline{2-3}  & Various proposals for IoT malware protection, both generalised and specialised. & 4 out of 18 papers listed. & [2; 205; 207; 211] \\ \cline{2-3}  & Usage of honeypots helps make more real-life like data for mitigation strategies. & 1 out of 18 papers listed. & [224] \\ \cline{2-3}  & No standardised way to protect pervasive computing device hurts development of mitigation strategies. & 1 out of 18 papers listed. & [225] \\ \cline{2-3}  & Best-practices in IT security years for standardising security in IoT and mobile devices. & 1 out of 18 papers listed. & [2] \\ \hline \multirow{7}{*}{Increasing complexity of botnets} & Most firewalls and intrusion detection systems are not able to filter IPv6 traffic. & 2 out of 3 papers listed & [226; 227] \\ \cline{2-3}  & Modern botnets can circumvent traditional detection methods using encrypted channels for traditionally unencrypted traffic. & 1 out of 3 papers listed. & [228] \\ \hline \multirow{7}{*}{Social Botnets} & Social botnets can be used for multiple purposes, including spam, C\&C and falsifying/impersonating user behaviour. & 2 out of 4 papers listed. & [87; 199] \\ \cline{2-3}  & It is growing increasingly harder for users to discern between true and false information, benefiting botnets. & 1 out of 4 papers listed. & [166] \\ \cline{2-3}  & New and more advanced counter measures are necessary to combat this new development of social botnets. & 1 out of 4 papers listed. & [1] \\ \cline{2-3}  & & & \\ \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 10: Overview of papers discussing current trends and topics concerning botnets. The columns describes the trends of the overall associated area of interest, the detailed topics discussed in each paper, the relative interest amongst the associated trend and finally a listing of all the associated papers.  
The current state of botnets and botnet research is consistently changing. As described in Section 5, on the topic of botnet evolution, botnets are constantly evolving. This section lists some of the general trends and challenges that have been identified during the reading for this paper.