Detecting insider threat within institutions using CERT dataset and different ML techniques

The reason of countries development in industrial and commercial enterprises fields in those countries. The security of a particular country depends on its security institutions, the confidentiality of its employees, their information, the target's information, and information about the forensic evidence for those targets. One of the most important and critical problems in such institutions is the problem of discovering an insider threat that causes loss, damage, or theft the information to hostile or competing parties. This threat is represented by a person who represents one of the employees of the institution, the goal of that person is to steal information or destroy it for the benefit of another institution's desires. The difficulty in detecting this type of threat is due to the difficulty of analyzing the behavior of people within the organization according to their physiological characteristics. In this research, CERT dataset that produced by the University of Carnegie Mellon University has been used in this investigation to detect insider threat. The dataset has been preprocessed. Five effective features were selected to apply three ML techniques Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, and 1 Nearest Neighbor. The results obtained and listed sequentially as 89.75917519%, 91.96650826%, and 94.68205476% with an error rate of 10.24082481%, 8.03349174%, and 5.317945236%

Metaheuristic-Based Neural Network Training And Feature Selector For Intrusion Detection

Intrusion Detection (ID) in the context of computer networks is an essential technique in modern defense-in-depth security strategies. As such, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) have received tremendous attention from security researchers and professionals. An important concept in ID is anomaly detection, which amounts to the isolation of normal behavior of network traffic from abnormal (anomaly) events. This isolation is essentially a classification task, which led researchers to attempt the application of well-known classifiers from the area of machine learning to intrusion detection. Neural Networks (NNs) are one of the most popular techniques to perform non-linear classification, and have been extensively used in the literature to perform intrusion detection. However, the training datasets usually compose feature sets of irrelevant or redundant information, which impacts the performance of classification, and traditional learning algorithms such as backpropagation suffer from known issues, including slow convergence and the trap of local minimum. Those problems lend themselves to the realm of optimization. Considering the wide success of swarm intelligence methods in optimization problems, the main objective of this thesis is to contribute to the improvement of intrusion detection technology through the application of swarm-based optimization techniques to the basic problems of selecting optimal packet features, and optimal training of neural networks on classifying those features into normal and attack instances. To realize these objectives, the research in this thesis follows three basic stages, succeeded by extensive evaluations

Impact and key challenges of insider threats on organizations and critical businesses

The insider threat has consistently been identified as a key threat to organizations and governments. Understanding the nature of insider threats and the related threat landscape can help in forming mitigation strategies, including non-technical means. In this paper, we survey and highlight challenges associated with the identification and detection of insider threats in both public and private sector organizations, especially those part of a nation’s critical infrastructure. We explore the utility of the cyber kill chain to understand insider threats, as well as understanding the underpinning human behavior and psychological factors. The existing defense techniques are discussed and critically analyzed, and improvements are suggested, in line with the current state-of-the-art cyber security requirements. Finally, open problems related to the insider threat are identified and future research directions are discussed

Autoencoder based anomaly detection for SCADA networks

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are industrial control systems that are used to monitor critical infrastructures such as airports, transport, health, and public services of national importance. These are cyber physical systems, which are increasingly integrated with networks and internet of things devices. However, this results in a larger attack surface for cyber threats, making it important to identify and thwart cyber-attacks by detecting anomalous network traffic patterns. Compared to other techniques, as well as detecting known attack patterns, machine learning can also detect new and evolving threats. Autoencoders are a type of neural network that generates a compressed representation of its input data and through reconstruction loss of inputs can help identify anomalous data. This paper proposes the use of autoencoders for unsupervised anomaly-based intrusion detection using an appropriate differentiating threshold from the loss distribution and demonstrate improvements in results compared to other techniques for SCADA gas pipeline dataset

Real-time big data processing for anomaly detection : a survey

The advent of connected devices and omnipresence of Internet have paved way for intruders to attack networks, which leads to cyber-attack, financial loss, information theft in healthcare, and cyber war. Hence, network security analytics has become an important area of concern and has gained intensive attention among researchers, off late, specifically in the domain of anomaly detection in network, which is considered crucial for network security. However, preliminary investigations have revealed that the existing approaches to detect anomalies in network are not effective enough, particularly to detect them in real time. The reason for the inefficacy of current approaches is mainly due the amassment of massive volumes of data though the connected devices. Therefore, it is crucial to propose a framework that effectively handles real time big data processing and detect anomalies in networks. In this regard, this paper attempts to address the issue of detecting anomalies in real time. Respectively, this paper has surveyed the state-of-the-art real-time big data processing technologies related to anomaly detection and the vital characteristics of associated machine learning algorithms. This paper begins with the explanation of essential contexts and taxonomy of real-time big data processing, anomalous detection, and machine learning algorithms, followed by the review of big data processing technologies. Finally, the identified research challenges of real-time big data processing in anomaly detection are discussed. © 2018 Elsevier Lt

Robust filtering schemes for machine learning systems to defend Adversarial Attack

Robust filtering schemes for machine learning systems to defend Adversarial Attac

Systematic construction of anomaly detection benchmarks from real data

Research in anomaly detection suffers from a lack of realis-tic and publicly-available problem sets. This paper discusses what properties such problem sets should possess. It then introduces a methodology for transforming existing classi-fication data sets into ground-truthed benchmark data sets for anomaly detection. The methodology produces data sets that vary along three important dimensions: (a) point diffi-culty, (b) relative frequency of anomalies, and (c) clustered-ness. We apply our generated datasets to benchmark several popular anomaly detection algorithms under a range of dif-ferent conditions. 1

Organizational cloud security and control: a proactive approach

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to unfold the perceptions around additional security in cloud environments by highlighting the importance of controlling mechanisms as an approach to the ethical use of the systems. The study focuses on the effects of the controlling mechanisms in maintaining an overall secure position for the cloud and the mediating role of the ethical behavior in this relationship. Design/methodology/approach A case study was conducted, examining the adoption of managed cloud security services as a means of control, as well as a large-scale survey with the views of IT decision makers about the effects of such adoption to the overall cloud security. Findings The findings indicate that there is indeed a positive relationship between the adoption of controlling mechanisms and the maintenance of overall cloud security, which increases when the users follow an ethical behavior in the use of the cloud. A framework based on the findings is built suggesting a research agenda for the future and a conceptualization of the field. Research limitations/implications One of the major limitations of the study is the fact that the data collection was based on the perceptions of IT decision makers from a cross-section of industries; however the proposed framework should also be examined in industry-specific context. Although the firm size was indicated as a high influencing factor, it was not considered for this study, as the data collection targeted a range of organizations from various sizes. Originality/value This study extends the research of IS security behavior based on the notion that individuals (clients and providers of cloud infrastructure) are protecting something separate from themselves, in a cloud-based environment, sharing responsibility and trust with their peers. The organization in this context is focusing on managed security solutions as a proactive measurement to preserve cloud security in cloud environments