Nested Dirichlet models for unsupervised attack pattern detection in honeypot data
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Accepted version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Cyber-systems are under near-constant threat from intrusion attempts. Attacks types vary, but each attempt typically has a specific underlying intent, and the perpetrators are typically groups of individuals with similar objectives. Clustering attacks appearing to share a common intent is very valuable to threat-hunting experts. This article explores topic models for clustering terminal session commands collected from honeypots, which are special network hosts designed to entice malicious attackers. The main practical implications of clustering the sessions are two-fold: finding similar groups of attacks, and identifying outliers. A range of statistical topic models are considered, adapted to the structures of command-line syntax. In particular, concepts of primary and secondary topics, and then session-level and command-level topics, are introduced into the models to improve interpretability. The proposed methods are further extended in a Bayesian nonparametric fashion to allow unboundedness in the vocabulary size and the number of latent intents. The methods are shown to discover an unusual MIRAI variant which attempts to take over existing cryptocurrency coin-mining infrastructure, not detected by traditional topic-modelling approaches.
Date Issued
2025-03
Date Acceptance
2024-10-15
Citation
Annals of Applied Statistics, 2025, 19 (1), pp.586-613
ISSN
1932-6157
Publisher
Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Start Page
586
End Page
613
Journal / Book Title
Annals of Applied Statistics
Volume
19
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
Subject to copyright. This paper is embargoed until publication. Once published the author’s accepted manuscript will be made available under a CC-BY License in accordance with Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access policy (www.imperial.ac.uk/oa-policy).
License URL
Identifier
http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.02505v3
Subjects
cs.CR
stat.AP
Publication Status
Published
Rights Embargo Date
10000-01-01