D22/D5.2 Root Causes Analysis: Experimental Report

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This deliverable offers an extensive report of all experiments carried out with respect to root cause analysis techniques. This final deliverable for Workpackage 5 (Threats Intelligence ) builds upon D12 (D5.1 - Technical Survey on Root Cause Analysis) and benefits from the modifications made to the various software modules developed in WP4, following up the experimental feedback.
The R&D efforts carried out in WP5 with respect to root cause analysis have produced a novel framework for attack attribution called triage. This framework has been successfully applied to various wombat datasets to perform intelligence analyses by taking advantage of several structural and contextual features of the data sets developed by the different partners. These experiments enabled us to get insights into the underlying root phenomena that have likely caused many security events observed by sensors deployed by wombat partners.
In this deliverable, we provide an in-depth description of experimental results obtained with triage, in particular with respect to (i) the analysis of Rogue AV campaigns (based on  HARMUR data), and (ii) the analysis of different malware variants attributed to the Allaple malware family (based on data from SGNET, VirusTotal and Anubis).
Finally, we describe another experiment performed on a large spam data set obtained from Symantec.Cloud (formerly MessageLabs), for which triage was successfully used to analyze spam botnets and their ecosystem, i.e., how those botnets are used by spammers to organize and coordinate their spam campaigns. Thanks to this application, we are considering a possible technology transfer of triage to Symantec.Cloud, who is interested in carrying out regular intelligence analyses of their spam data sets, and may ralso consider the integration of triage to their Skeptic ○ spam filtering technology.



FP7-ICT-216026-Wombat_WP5_D22_V01_Root-Cause-Analysis-Experimental-report.pdf