A compression-based method for detecting anomalies in textual data

Nowadays, information and communications technology systems are fundamental assets of our social and economical model, and thus they should be properly protected against the malicious activity of cybercriminals. Defence mechanisms are generally articulated around tools that trace and store informati...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Authors: de la Torre-Abaitua, Gonzalo, Lago Fernández, Luis Fernando, Arroyo, David
Format: article
Publication Date:2021
Country:España
Institution:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repository:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/699120
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10486/699120
https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23050618
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Anomaly detection
Data-driven security
Intrusion detection systems
Normalized compression distance
Text mining
Informática
Description
Summary:Nowadays, information and communications technology systems are fundamental assets of our social and economical model, and thus they should be properly protected against the malicious activity of cybercriminals. Defence mechanisms are generally articulated around tools that trace and store information in several ways, the simplest one being the generation of plain text files coined as security logs. Such log files are usually inspected, in a semi-automatic way, by security analysts to detect events that may affect system integrity, confidentiality and availability. On this basis, we propose a parameter-free method to detect security incidents from structured text regardless its nature. We use the Normalized Compression Distance to obtain a set of features that can be used by a Support Vector Machine to classify events from a heterogeneous cybersecurity environment. In particular, we explore and validate the application of our method in four different cybersecurity domains: HTTP anomaly identification, spam detection, Domain Generation Algorithms tracking and sentiment analysis. The results obtained show the validity and flexibility of our approach in different security scenarios with a low configuration burden