A security operation center (SOC) is a cybersecurity clearinghouse responsible for monitoring, collecting and analyzing security events from organizations’ IT infrastructure and security controls. Despite their popularity, SOCs are facing increasing challenges and pressure due to the growing volume, velocity and variety of the IT infrastructure and security data observed on a daily basis. Due to the mixed performance of current technological solutions, e.g. intrusion detection system (IDS) and security information and event management (SIEM), there is an over-reliance on manual analysis of the events by human security analysts. This creates huge backlogs and slows down considerably the resolution of critical security events. Obvious solutions include increasing the accuracy and efficiency of crucial aspects of the SOC automation workflow, such as the event classification and prioritization. In the current thesis, we present a new approach for SOC event classification and prioritization by identifying a set of new machine learning features using graph visualization and graph metrics. Using a real-world SOC dataset and by applying different machine learning classification techniques, we demonstrate empirically the benefit of using the graph-based features in terms of improved classification accuracy. Three different classification techniques are explored, namely, logistic regression, XGBoost and deep neural network (DNN). The experimental evaluation shows for the DNN, the best performing classifier, area under curve (AUC) values of 91% for the baseline feature set and 99% for the augmented feature set that includes the graph-based features, which is a net improvement of 8% in classification performance. / Graduate

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