US Patent 8260914 Detecting DNS fast-flux anomalies

A method for detecting automatically generated malicious domain names in a network. The method includes identifying a plurality of domain name service (DNS) queries in the network, wherein the plurality of DNS queries share a common attribute, analyzing, using a central processing unit (CPU) of a computer, the plurality of DNS queries to identify a plurality of alphanumeric elements embedded in a set of domain names associated with the plurality of DNS queries, analyzing, using the CPU, the plurality of alphanumeric elements to determine a distribution metric of the set of domain names, and generating an alert based on the distribution metric according to a pre-determined criterion.