Knowing who to watch: identifying attackers whose actions are hidden within false alarms and background noise

TY - JOUR

T1 - Knowing who to watch

T2 - identifying attackers whose actions are hidden within false alarms and background noise

AU - Chivers, Howard

AU - Clark, John

AU - Nobles, Philip

AU - Shaikh, Siraj

AU - Chen, Hao

N1 - 10.1007/s10796-010-9268-7

PY - 2010/9/23

Y1 - 2010/9/23

N2 - Insider attacks are often subtle and slow, or preceded by behavioral indicators such as organizational rule-breaking which provide the potential for early warning of malicious intent; both these cases pose the problem of identifying attacks from limited evidence contained within a large volume of event data collected from multiple sources over a long period. This paper proposes a scalable solution to this problem by maintaining long-term estimates that individuals or nodes are attackers, rather than retaining event data for post-facto analysis. These estimates are then used as triggers for more detailed investigation. We identify essential attributes of event data, allowing the use of a wide range of indicators, and show how to apply Bayesian statistics to maintain incremental estimates without global updating. The paper provides a theoretical account of the process, a worked example, and a discussion of its practical implications. The work includes examples that identify subtle attack behaviour in subverted network nodes, but the process is not network-specific and is capable of integrating evidence from other sources, such as behavioral indicators, document access logs and financial records, in addition to events identified by network monitoring.

AB - Insider attacks are often subtle and slow, or preceded by behavioral indicators such as organizational rule-breaking which provide the potential for early warning of malicious intent; both these cases pose the problem of identifying attacks from limited evidence contained within a large volume of event data collected from multiple sources over a long period. This paper proposes a scalable solution to this problem by maintaining long-term estimates that individuals or nodes are attackers, rather than retaining event data for post-facto analysis. These estimates are then used as triggers for more detailed investigation. We identify essential attributes of event data, allowing the use of a wide range of indicators, and show how to apply Bayesian statistics to maintain incremental estimates without global updating. The paper provides a theoretical account of the process, a worked example, and a discussion of its practical implications. The work includes examples that identify subtle attack behaviour in subverted network nodes, but the process is not network-specific and is capable of integrating evidence from other sources, such as behavioral indicators, document access logs and financial records, in addition to events identified by network monitoring.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84874817369&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s10796-010-9268-7

DO - 10.1007/s10796-010-9268-7

M3 - Article

SN - 1387-3326

VL - 15

SP - 17

EP - 34

JO - Information Systems Frontiers

JF - Information Systems Frontiers

IS - 1

ER -