Discovering collaborative cyber attack patterns using social network analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates collaborative cyber attacks based on social network analysis. An Attack Social Graph (ASG) is defined to represent cyber attacks on the Internet. Features are extracted from ASGs to analyze collaborative patterns. We use principle component analysis to reduce the feature space, and hierarchical clustering to group attack sources that exhibit similar behavior. Experiments with real world data illustrate that our framework can effectively reduce from large dataset to clusters of attack sources exhibiting critical collaborative patterns. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.