The SSA Vic branch's next event is on the 27th of August - a talk by Professor Jill Slay AM at La Trobe university's Bundoora campus. See below for a description of the talk. For the full details of the event and a calendar item see the event page.

Detecting botnet activity using machine learning

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of interconnected everyday objects (“things”) that have been augmented with a small measure of computing capabilities. Lately, the IoT has been affected by a variety of different botnet activities. As botnets have been the cause of serious security risks and financial damage over the years, existing network forensic techniques cannot identify and track current sophisticated methods of botnets. This is because commercial tools mainly depend on signature-based approaches that cannot discover new forms of botnet.  In literature, several studies have been conducted with the use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques in order to train and validate a model for defining such attacks, but they still produce high false alarm rates with the challenge of investigating the tracks of botnets.  In this talk, I will present our work investigating the use of ML techniques for developing a network forensic mechanism based on network flow identifiers that can track suspicious activities of botnets. Our experimental results using the UNSW-NB15 dataset revealed that ML techniques with flow identifiers can effectively and efficiently detect botnets’ attacks and their tracks.  This is joint work with: N Koroniotis, N Moustafa, E Sitnikova.

See you there!

Ben Harrap

Secretary

SSA Vic branch