The increasing impact of Internet in the global
economy has transformed botnets into one of the most feared
security threats for citizens, organizations and governments.
Despite the significant efforts that have been made over
the last years to understand this phenomenon and develop
detection techniques and countermeasures, this continues to
be a field with big challenges to address. The most important
detection approaches and countermeasures that have been
proposed are usually oriented to address some specific type
of botnet threat or fight botnets in particular scenarios or
conditions. This paper proposes a generic and systematic
model to describe the network dynamics whenever a botnet
threat is detected, defining all actors, dimensions, states and
actions that need to be taken into account at each moment.
We believe that this type of modeling approach is the basis for
developing systematic and integrated frameworks, strategies
and tools to predict and fight botnet threats in an efficient
way.