Automatic Attack Pattern Mining for Generating Actionable CTI Applying Alert Aggregation

Abstract

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) monitor all kinds of IT infrastructures to automatically detect malicious activities related to cyber attacks. Unfortunately, especially anomaly-based IDS are known to produce large numbers of alerts, including false positives, that often become overwhelming for manual analysis. However, due to a fast changing threat landscape, quickly evolving attack techniques, and ever growing number of vulnerabilities, novel anomaly detection systems that enable detection of unknown attacks are indispensable. Therefore, to reduce the number of alerts that have to be reviewed by security analysts, aggregation methods have been developed for filtering, grouping, and correlating alerts. Yet, existing techniques either rely on manually defined attack scenarios or require specific alert formats, such as IDMEF that includes IP addresses. This makes the application of existing aggregation methods infeasible for alerts from host-based or anomaly-based IDSs that frequently lack such network-related data. In this chapter, we present a domain-independent alert aggregation technique that enables automatic attack pattern mining and generation of actionable CTI. The chapter describes the concept of the proposed alert aggregation process as well as a dashboard that enables visualization and filtering of the results. Finally, the chapter demonstrates all features in course of an application example.