Biblio

In a continually evolving cyber-threat landscape, the detection and prevention of cyber attacks has become a complex task. Technological developments have led organisations to digitise the majority of their operations. This practice, however, has its perils, since cybespace offers a new attack-surface. Institutions which are tasked to protect organisations from these threats utilise mainly network data and their incident response strategy remains oblivious to the needs of the organisation when it comes to protecting operational aspects. This paper presents a system able to combine threat intelligence data, attack-trend data and organisational data (along with other data sources available) in order to achieve automated network-defence actions. Our approach combines machine learning, visual analytics and information from business processes to guide through a decision-making process for a Security Operation Centre environment. We test our system on two synthetic scenarios and show that correlating network data with non-network data for automated network defences is possible and worth investigating further.

Organizations are experiencing an ever-growing concern of how to identify and defend against insider threats. Those who have authorized access to sensitive organizational data are placed in a position of power that could well be abused and could cause significant damage to an organization. This could range from financial theft and intellectual property theft to the destruction of property and business reputation. Traditional intrusion detection systems are neither designed nor capable of identifying those who act maliciously within an organization. In this paper, we describe an automated system that is capable of detecting insider threats within an organization. We define a tree-structure profiling approach that incorporates the details of activities conducted by each user and each job role and then use this to obtain a consistent representation of features that provide a rich description of the user's behavior. Deviation can be assessed based on the amount of variance that each user exhibits across multiple attributes, compared against their peers. We have performed experimentation using ten synthetic data-driven scenarios and found that the system can identify anomalous behavior that may be indicative of a potential threat. We also show how our detection system can be combined with visual analytics tools to support further investigation by an analyst.