Using Dirichlet Marked Hawkes Processes for Insider Threat Detection

Abstract

Malicious insiders cause significant loss to organizations. Due to an extremely small number of malicious activities from insiders, insider threat is hard to detect. In this article, we present a Dirichlet Marked Hawkes Process (DMHP) to detect malicious activities from insiders in real-time. DMHP combines the Dirichlet process and marked Hawkes processes to model the sequence of user activities. The Dirichlet process is capable of detecting unbounded user modes (patterns) of infinite user activities, while, for each detected user mode, one set of marked Hawkes processes is adopted to model user activities from time and activity type (e.g., WWW visit or send email) information so that different user modes are modeled by different sets of marked Hawkes processes. To achieve real-time malicious insider activity detection, the likelihood of the most recent activity calculated by DMHP is adopted as a score to measure the maliciousness of the activity. Since the majority of user activities are benign, those activities with low likelihoods are labeled as malicious activities. Experimental results on two datasets show the effectiveness of DMHP.