Network Security Through Data Analysis, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. On Fumbling

Up to this point, we have discussed a number of techniques for collecting and analyzing data. We must now marry this with attacker behavior.

Recall from Chapter 3 the distinction between anomaly and signature detection. A focus of this book is on identifying viable mechanisms for detecting and dealing with anomalies, and to find these mechanisms, we must identify general attacker behaviors. Fumbling, which is the topic of this chapter, is the first of several such behaviors.

Fumbling refers to the process of systematically failing to connect to a target using a reference. That reference might be an IP address, a URL, or an email address. What makes fumbling suspicious is that a legitimate user should be given the references he needs. When you start at a new company, they tell you the name of the email server; you don’t have to guess it.

Attackers don’t have access to that information. They must guess, steal, or scout that data from the system, and they will make mistakes. Often, those mistakes are huge and systematic. Identifying these mistakes and differentiating them from innocent errors is a valuable first step for analysis.

In this chapter, we will look at models of normal user behavior that are violated by attackers. This chapter integrates a variety of results from previous chapters, including material on email, network traffic, and social network analysis.

Fumbling: Misconfiguration, Automation, and Scanning

We’ll use the term fumble to refer ...