Detection of complex cyber attacks

One significant drawback to currently available security products is their inabilty to correlate diverse sensor input. For instance, by only using network intrusion detection data, a root kit installed through a weak username-password combination may go unnoticed. Similarly, an administrator may never make the link between deteriorating response times from the database server and an attacker exfiltrating trusted data, if these facts aren't presented together. Current Security Information Management Systems (SIMS) can collect and represent diverse data but lack sufficient correlation algorithms. By using a Process Query System, we were able to quickly bring together data flowing from many sources, including NIDS, HIDS, server logs, CPU load and memory usage, etc. We constructed PQS models that describe dynamic behavior of complicated attacks and failures, allowing us to detect and differentiate simultaneous sophisticated attacks on a target network. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of implementing such a multistage cyber attack detection system using PQS. We focus on how data from multiple sources can be combined and used to detect and track comprehensive network security events that go unnoticed using conventional tools.

[1]  Christos G. Cassandras,et al.  Introduction to Discrete Event Systems , 1999, The Kluwer International Series on Discrete Event Dynamic Systems.

[2]  Vincent H. Berk,et al.  An overview of process query systems , 2004, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[3]  Vincent H. Berk,et al.  Process query systems for network security monitoring , 2005, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.