Expert knowledge and data analysis for detecting advanced persistent threats

Abstract

Abstract Critical Infrastructures in public administration would be compromised by Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) which today constitute one of the most sophisticated ways of stealing information. This paper presents an effective, learning based tool that uses inductive techniques to analyze the information provided by firewall log files in an IT infrastructure, and detect suspicious activity in order to mark it as a potential APT. The experiments have been accomplished mixing real and synthetic data traffic to represent different proportions of normal and anomalous activity.