Clustering Techniques for Analyzing Cyber Data

The Power of Partnership – from Vision to Reality
L-3 Data Tactics:
Data Science Brown Bag
Welcome!
Hard and Soft Clusters and Cyber Data
April 22, 2014
!
R2 = 500; p<.05
asymptotically approaching perfect

!
•Why a (our 3rd) Data Science Brown Bag (Rich H.)?
!
•About US & About YOU (Rich H.)!!

!
•Case Studies in Cyber:
•What is Clustering, Honeypots and Density Based Clustering (Max W.)?
•What is Optics Clustering and how is it different than DB Clustering? …and how
can it be used for outlier detection. (David P.)
•What is so-called soft clustering and how is it different than clustering? …and how
can it be used for outlier detection. (Nathan D.)
!
•On the horizon...(Rich H.)
DT Data Science Brown Bag: Outline
L-3

DT Data Science Brown Bag: Outline
Learning [close] at a pace similar to the pace at which we learn.
!
Learning and Educating from/to DS to PMs, SWE, and OPs.
!
DS2PM: Provide insights for FRIs/RFPs.
PM2DS: Atmospherics from our costumers.
!
DS2SWE: Integrating algorithms.
SWE2DS: Accessing data spaces.
!
DS2OP: How do you consume the outputs of models?
OP2DS: What models are best to present to OPs?
DS: Data Scientist, PM: Program Managers, SWE: Software Engineers, OP: Operators
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The Team:

(Geoffrey B., Nathan D., Rich H., David P., Ted P., Shrayes R., Jonathan T., Adam VE., Max W.)
!
Graduates from top universities…
…many of whom are EMC Data Science Certified.
!
Advanced degrees include:

mathematics, computer science, astrophysics, electrical
engineering, mechanical engineering, statistics, social sciences.

!
Base competencies (horizontals): clustering, association rules,
regression, naive bayesian classifier, decision trees, time-series, text
analysis.

!
Going beyond the base (verticals)...
About Us: DT Data Science Team
L-3

L-3
Clustering || Regression || Decision Trees || Text Analysis
Association Rules || Naive Bayesian Classifier || Time Series Analysis
econom
etrics
spatialeconom
etrics
graph
theory
algorithm
s
astrophysicaltim
e-series
analysis
path
planning
algorithm
s
bayesian
statistics
constrained
optim
izations
num
ericalintegration
techniques
PCA
bagging/boosting
hierarchicalm
odels
IRT
space-tim
e
latentclass
analysis
structuralequation
m
odeling
m
ixture
m
odels
SVM
m
axent
CART
autoregressive
m
odels
ICA
factoranalysis
random
forest
dim
ensionalreduction
topic
m
odels
sentim
entanalysis
frequency
dom
ain
patterns
unsupervised
by
supervised
change-pointm
odels
LUBAP
DLISA
DBAC
optics
clustering

Hierarchy of Data Scientists
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!
!
No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems: no algorithm performs
better than any other when their performance is averaged
uniformly over all possible problems of a particular type.
Algorithms must be designed for a particular domain or style
of problem, and that there is no such thing as a general
purpose algorithm.

!
!
!
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ABOUT YOU:
35 confirmed, 15 webex, 21 Data Tactics employees, 13 L-3 NSS
employees; Sam Posten was the first to sign-up (webex) and Aaron Glahe was
the first to sign-up for in-person!
!
# define Twitter account names
start <- getUser(“L3_NSS”)
finish <- getUser(“DataTactics”)
!
# find all connections independently of each account
dt.friends.object <- lookupUsers(start$getFriendsIDs())
l3.friends.object <- lookupUsers(finish$getFriendsIDs())
!
#create one large table that relates followers from each account
relations <- merge(data.frame(User=“DataTactics”, follower=dt.friends),
data.frame(User=l3.friends, Followers=“L3_NSS”), all=TRUE)
!
#create network layout showing each account’s community and overlap
g.followers <- graph.data.frame(relations.followers, directed = T)
!
#finally plot the graph
tkplot(g) L-3

ABOUT YOU:
@DataTactics
@L3_NSS
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ABOUT YOU:
@L3_NSS
@DataTactics
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Why Clustering?
L-3
Six Pillars of Data Mining:

Clustering has become a workhorse in Big Data and fits into the Six Pillars of Data Mining and our own
DS4PM & DS4G framework.

• Anomaly detection: the identification of unusual data records, that might be interesting or data errors that require
further investigation.
• Association rule learning: searches for relationships between variables.
• Clustering: is the task of discovering groups and structures in the data that are in some way or another "similar",
without using known structures in the data.
• Classification: is the task of generalizing known structure to apply to new data.
• Regression: finds a function which models the data with the least error.
• Summarization: providing a more compact representation of the data set.

!
Taxonomy of Questions (ref: DS4PM):
!
• Causal Effects: is an approach to the statistical analysis of cause and effect based on the framework of potential
outcomes
• Classification/Clustering: identifying to which of a set of observations belong, on the basis of a training set of data
or without labels in the clustering approach.
• Outlier Detection: is the identification of events which do not conform to an expected pattern or other items in a
dataset.
• Big Data and Analytics: discovering interesting relations between variables in large databases
• Measurement Models: statistical models to measure the relationships between the observable variables and the
unobserved (or “latent”) quantity

• Text Analysis: refers to the process of deriving high-quality information from text.

Max Watson: Max’s background is in physics and applied mathematics. Max
completed his undergraduate degree at University of California, Berkeley and
completed his PhD at University of California, Santa Barbara in 2012. Max
specializes in large-scale simulations, signal analysis and statistical physics - he
joined the Data Tactics team in January 2014 and has supported DHS. Max is an
EMC Certified Data Scientist.
David Pekarek: David’s background is in Mechanical Engineering and specializes
in mechanical control systems, optimization, and spatio-temporal statistics. David
finished his PhD in 2010 from California Institute of Technology and joined Data
Tactics in the fall of 2012 and currently supports DARPA.
Nathan Danneman: Nathan’s background is in political science, with
specializations in applied statistics and international conflict. He finished his PhD
in June of 2013, and joined Data Tactics in May of that same year. He recently co-
authored Social Media Mining with R, is active in the local Data Science
community and currently supports DARPA. Nathan is an EMC Certified Data
Scientist.
!
Today’s presenters:
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L-3
Cluster Analysis of
Honeypot Data
By Max Watson

Outline
14
• What are Honeypots?

!
• Cluster Analysis

! -General Principles

-Density Based Clustering

!
• Cluster Analysis Applied to Honeypot Data

!
• Conclusions

!
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Honeypots
15
8 websites: (USA, 4), (Singapore, 2), (Brazil, 2) [brought to you by Ted Procita]

!
Collection Period: October 15, 2013 - November 18, 2013

!
2 Sources of Data: requests at firewall and requests at webserver
!
number of webserver requests: ~4000
Honeypots are traps set to detect, deflect, or counteract

attempts at unauthorized use of information systems
some information from a typical ‘hit’ on the webserver:

!
IP address Country Request Timestamp

101.227.4.25 CN /robots.txt 10/17/13 17:58:21
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Goals of Honeypot Analysis
16
• Categorize IP addresses in terms of similar requests

!
• Determine how requests vary by country

!
• Detect outliers
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Cluster Analysis
17
Grouping similar objects:
Requirements:

!
1) Distance metric

!
!
2) Method for grouping nearby objects
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Distance I: Combine Requests
18
1) Gather all unique requests invoked by each IP address:

!
!
IP1 ⇒ { /, /robots.txt, …}

!
IP2 ⇒ { /HNAP1/, /manager/html, …}

. .
. .
. .
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Distance II: Jaccard Similarity
19
Requests from IP address A: {♣,♦}

!
Requests from IP address B: {,♦}
Jaccard Similarity:
intersection(A, B) = {♦} union(A, B) = {♣, ♦, }
J(A, B) = 1/3
Effective Distance: D = 1 - J
0 1
D = 0 : A and B issue the same requests

D = 1 : A and B issue completely different requests
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Distance III: All Pairs
20
Calculate effective distance between all pairs of IP addresses
!
...leaving us with:
But usually in a high number of dimensions!
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Identifying Clusters
21
How many clusters are there?

Are there outliers?
Density Based Clustering:

● connectivity

● density
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Connectivity
22
Distance

Threshold
Number

of Clusters
Distance Threshold
3

2

1
Cluster 1
Cluster 2
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Density Based Clustering
23
2 parameters: distance threshold and minimum number of neighbors (DBSCAN)
example:

minimum number = 2
Outliers
Clusters
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China
25
Dominant Requests of Each Cluster
!
❶ /robots.txt ❷ /
❸ /manager/html ❹ www.baidu.com/
! L-3

China
26
Other
!
/manager/html
Time (~34 Days)
Hits Over Time
NumberofHits
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United States
27
10 Clusters (Malicious & Benign)
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United States
28
Clusters
!
Outliers
from same

IP address
NumberofHits
Time (~34 Days)
Hits Over Time
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Accomplishments
29
✓ Categorized behavior of IP addresses based on requests

!
✓
Detection of outliers

!
✓ Determined how requests vary by country (China vs. USA)
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What Clustering Can Do for You
30
Objects + Attributes
Cluster the Objects Cluster the Attributes
Applications:

!
• IP addresses & their requests • patients & their symptoms

• devices & their malfunctions • people & their associates
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Port Based Clustering
of Firewall Activity
By David Pekarek
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Firewall Activity Clustering Workflow
Data Preprocessing!
and Vectorization
OPTICS !
Clustering
Follow-on
Investigations
Honey Pot!
Firewall Activity
Aggregated counts of
IP’s dest. port hits
Reachability Distance
plot identifying user
clusters and outliers
Characteristics of outlying
IPs and IP clusters
#!
#!
#!
#!
#!
#
Abc
Abc
Abc
Abc
Abc
Abc
#!
#!
#!
#!
#!
#
#!
#!
#!
#!
#!
#
Abc
Abc
Abc
Abc
Abc
Abc
~32K!
logs
time, host, src IP,
location, ports, protocol
#!
#!
#!
#!
#!
#
#!
#!
#!
#!
#!
#
#!
#!
#!
#!
#!
#
~19K
IPs
128 ports
#!
#!
#!
#!
#!
#
#!
#!
#!
#!
#!
#
outliers
clusters
Distinct activity
levels on port
53
• The majority of source IPs make use of only one destination port!
• 94% of source IPs fall into some cluster with similar port usage and
traffic volume
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OPTICS: Hierarchical Density Based Clustering
• Clustering algorithms provide a means to sort data without pre-existing labels!
• Density-based clustering methods are robust in identifying clusters with non-
uniform shapes
• The OPTICS algorithm is a density-based approach that simultaneously
evaluates cluster results at different scales
k-Means!
results
Density-based!
clustering !
results
Is this one cluster or two?!
The answer depends on scale!
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OPTICS: How does it work?
• The OPTICS algorithm performs two major operations on the data:!
• determining an ordering of all data points, based on the likelihood of points being
clustered together
• assigning each point a Reachability Distance (R.D.): a quantification of the length
scale at which the given point will belong to any cluster
• Plotting R.D. vs the ordered data points, clusters appear as troughs
Whole face
Eye EyeSmile
Outliers
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OPTICS: How was it applied?
Data Preprocessing!
and Vectorization
OPTICS !
Clustering
Follow-on
Investigations
• Source IPs used as the identifier for entities with traffic hitting the honey pot
firewall.
• Destination ports used to define the dimensions of feature space. Each of
the 127 most common ports (those with at least 60 hits from the total
population) got its own dimension. The remaining ‘rare’ ports bundled as a
single dimension.
• OPTICS algorithm identified clusters of IPs in 128 dimensional space, with
clustering results summarized in a 2-D reachability plot !
• Follow-on investigations performed to identify anomalous properties of
outlying IPs and commonalities among clustered IPs
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Firewall Port Usage Clustering Results
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Firewall Port Usage Clustering Results
Clusters with some!
distinctive activity
Outlying IPs!
(Their activity falls into clusters only at
extremely generous length scales)
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Interactive Plotting Demo
Interactive Plotting
Demo Here
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Port Usage Cluster Characterization
IPs with minimal activity
on highly travelled ports
(22, 53, Other)
Outlying IPs:!
Activity on multiple ports or very
seldom used ports
1-15 hits on port 80
(HTTP)
(RDP)
(MSSQL)
(Active Directory)
Small clusters with activity !
on less used ports!
(3306, 5060, 4899, 135, 25, 23,
45091, 48879, 1234)
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Port 53 Traffic Clustering Validation
OPTICS identifies the
multimodal distribution of
traffic to port 53 (DNS)
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Conclusions
• Destination ports show little correlation in the firewall logs. Source
IPs tend to cluster by the one port to which they sent traffic.
• OPTICS clustering efficiently sorts source IPs as outliers or
belonging to a cluster of common port usage.
• Interactive plotting tools allow for the rapid characterization of
clusters.
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Latent Dirichlet Allocation: Characterizing
normal behavior and identifying deviations
from normality
By Nathan Danneman
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Outline
• What is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)?
• How does it compare to other clustering tools?
• LDA by example: analyzing log files
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LDA is a Mixture Model
• Mixture Models:
– Identify sets of variables that co-occur (behavioral patterns)
– Determine what behavioral patterns each individual exhibits
• Example: The Sports Equipment Analogy
Golf Clubs Tennis Racket Golf Balls Tennis Balls Baseball Bat
John 12 4
Susan 14 1 6 3
Chris 2 3
Jane 1 11 1
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• Mixture Models:
– Identify sets of variables that co-occur (behavioral patterns)
– Determine what behavioral patterns each individual exhibits
• Example: The Sports Equipment Analogy
John 12 4
Susan 14 1 6 3
Chris 2 3
Jane 1 11 1
LDA is a Mixture Model
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LDA Utilizes Soft Clustering
• Hard Clustering: every point is
assigned to one group
• Hard Clustering with Outliers: every
point is assigned to one or no
groups
• Soft Clustering: every point is
assigned to zero, one, or several
groups. x1
x2
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x1
x2
John 12 4
Susan 14 1 6 3
Chris 2 3
Jane 1 11 1
• Hard Clustering: every point is
assigned to one group
• Hard Clustering with Outliers: every
point is assigned to one or no
groups
• Soft Clustering: every point is
assigned to zero, one, or several
groups.
LDA Utilizes Soft Clustering
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Input Data for LDA: Cyber Data
• LDA takes a matrix of counts
• Data: log files from a large network; 8700 users, 85 log types
• Each row represents a user
• Each column represents a log type
Connection!
Success
Termination!
Success
Invalid !
Login
...
User 1 0 3 2
User 2 12 3 0
User 3 3 0 18
User 4 2 22 1
User 5 7 5 9
... ...
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LDA Estimates Two Mixtures
• Output 1: logs that co-occur, forming behavioral patterns
Log Type 1
!
Log Type 2
!
Log Type 3
!
Log Type 4
...
Behavioral
Pattern 1
!
!
Behavioral
Pattern 2
Each log relates to zero,
one, or many behavioral
patterns
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LDA Estimates Two Mixtures
• Output 1: logs that co-occur, forming behavioral patterns
• Output 2: which behavioral pattern(s) characterize each
user
Log Type 1
!
Log Type 2
!
Log Type 3
!
Log Type 4
...
Behavioral
Pattern 1
!
!
Behavioral
Pattern 2
User 1
!
User 2
!
User 3
!
User 4
...
Users exhibit zero, one, or
many behaviors
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LDA Workflow
• Build the N (observation) by P (log types) matrix of counts
• Use an empirical method to determine the optimal number
of behavioral patterns to estimate
• Estimate the model
Connection
(Successful)
Connection
(Failure)
Termination
(Successful)
Connection
(Time-Out)
User1 15 15 0 3
User2 8 12 2 0
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Output 1: Mapping Log Types to Behavioral Patterns: 
Behavioral Pattern #3
Firewall.Connections.Successful
Firewall.Connections.Terminations
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Output 1: Mapping Log Types to Behavioral Patterns: 
Behavioral Pattern #4
Windows.Hosts.User.Logins
Windows.Hosts.User.Logoffs
Windows.Hosts.User.Privileged.
Use.Successful
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Behavioral Pattern Characterization
• Behavioral Pattern 1:
• Windows Hosts: Failed Logins
• Firewall: Connections
• Windows Hosts: Logins, Logoffs
• Firewall: Connections, Terminations
• Windows Hosts: Logins
• Firewall: System Normal, Connections, Terminations
• Web Logs: System Normal
• Firewall: System Errors
Normal Activity
Abnormal Activity
Abnormal Activity
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Behavioral Pattern Characterization
W
indowsHosts:Failed
Logins
Firewall:Connections,
Term
inations
W
indowsHosts:LoginsFirewall:System
Norm
al,
Connections,Term
inations
W
eb
Logs:System
Norm
al
Firewall:System
Errors
Firewall:Connections
W
indowsHosts:Logins,Logoffs
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Characterizing Users with Behavioral Patterns
User # 2
Essentially, entirely firewall
connections and terminations.
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Characterizing Users with Behavioral Patterns
User # 43
Lots of failed logins!
Normal activity: connections,
terminations, logins, logoffs
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Visualizing Two-Level Mixtures
Behavioral Pattern 3
Behavioral Pattern 4
A User Characterized by:
45% Behavior 3 and
55% Behavior 4
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Outlier Detection with LDA
• Mixture models make predictions about the
proportion of each log type a user will have

• We can compare the predicted proportions to each
user’s actual proportions to see how well the
model captures each user’s actions

• Typical users should be well-characterized by
mixtures of common behavioral patterns – these
are “normal” users

• Users whose actions are not mixtures of common
behavioral patterns are doing things that are
uncommon – these are outliers
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Measuring User-Level Discrepancy
Cosine Similarity = 0.99
Proportions of All Log Types for a Single User
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Measuring User-Level Discrepancy
Cosine Similarity = 0.02
Proportions of All Log Types for a Single User
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Cosine Similarity between Predicted and
Observed Data (all users)
~99% of users are well-explained
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Cosine Similarity between Predicted and
Observed Data (poorly fit users)
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LDA Detects Univariate Outliers
One user had 77% Windows Hosts Failed Logins; mean for data is 0.002%
Proportion of Windows Hosts: Failed Login Logs
User # 12
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LDA Detects Conditional Outliers
User # 53 has a typical proportion
of Firewall Termination logs...
!
!
!
However, User 53 has more than twice
as many Firewall Terminations as users
with his/her same proportion of Firewall
Connections.
!
!
Percentage of Logs that are
Firewall Terminations
NumberofUsers
User 53
Firewall Terminations comprise
about 50% of many users’ logs
Percentage of Logs that are
Firewall Terminations
NumberofUsers
Firewall Terminations among
users with 53’s proportion of
Firewall Connections
User 53
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Conclusions
• LDA allows an analyst to:
– Succinctly characterize common behavioral patterns
– Capture nuance through soft clustering
– Identify both simple and conditional outliers
!
• Next Steps:
– Radically improve parallelized versions of LDA
– Build enhanced visualizations that allow analysts to interact with data
!
• Previous Steps:

– Cyber IR&D II - Honeypots & Topic Graphs
– https://portal.data-tactics-corp.com/sites/analytics/Shared
%20Documents/honeypots.pdf
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• Query based analytics are tenuous for data with large feature
spaces and population sizes. For complete answers, we must
analyze with comprehensive algorithms.
• Cyber systems regularly lack reliable (or stationary) models and
priors. Hence we have been focused on questions of pattern
detection (hard) and outlier detection (harder) for big cyber
data, primarily obtaining results via clustering analyses.
• There are many, many clustering algorithms, each with distinct
features and requirements (No Free Lunch for Theorems).
Choosing the most appropriate tool requires a deep
understanding of the available data, the questions at hand, and
the pros and cons of applicable methods.
Final Thoughts…
L-3

• L-3 Data Tactics has several minimally viable products (MVP)
working of very hard elements of the cyber analytics problem
set.

•These MVPs can be used in a support function to existing
security protocol and signature based systems - or provide
those systems already in place with pattern and anomaly
detection.

•Previous and future honeypot collection will further define L-3’s
cyber competencies in proactive cyber analytics.
Final Thoughts…
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...on the Horizon:
!
Honeypots and Twitter Collection Platforms
!
Summer Data Science Internship Program (Robert R. & USMA cadets):
Honeypots analytical application development
USA Civil Affairs & CERDEC Analytics
http://glimmer.rstudio.com/gosystems01/Stability/
Next Data Science Brown Bag late July.
!
DS4G & DS4PM both making appearances this year.
!
Data Science on display at the L-3 Technology Exchange 2014… more
to come.
… on the horizon.
L-3

The Data Science Team
http://datatactics.blogspot.com
L-3

The Data Science Team
https://github.com/DataTacticsCorp
L-3

Homepage: http://www.data-tactics.com
Blog: http://datatactics.blogspot.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rheimann
Or, me (Rich Heimann) at rheimann@data-tactics-corp.com
Questions?
L-3
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DataTactics
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mwatson
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ndanneman

Clustering Techniques for Analyzing Cyber Data

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