Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques.

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Modern Applied Statistics With S

/pdf/a-break-in-the-clouds-towards-a-cloud-definition-svovsw1r5a.pdf

A Break in the Clouds: Towards a Cloud Definition

We explore the effect of dimensionality on the nearest neighbor problem. We show that under a broad set of conditions (much broader than independent and identically distributed dimensions), as dimensionality increases, the distance to the nearest data point approaches the distance to the farthest data point. To provide a practical perspective, we present empirical results on both real and synthetic data sets that demonstrate that this effect can occur for as few as 10-15 dimensions. These results should not be interpreted to mean that high-dimensional indexing is never meaningful; we illustrate this point by identifying some high-dimensional workloads for which this effect does not occur. However, our results do emphasize that the methodology used almost universally in the database literature to evaluate high-dimensional indexing techniques is flawed, and should be modified. In particular, most such techniques proposed in the literature are not evaluated versus simple linear scan, and are evaluated over workloads for which nearest neighbor is not meaningful. Often, even the reported experiments, when analyzed carefully, show that linear scan would outperform the techniques being proposed on the workloads studied in high (10-15) dimensionality!.

When is nearest neighbor meaningful

With the continuous evolution of the types of attacks against computer networks, traditional intrusion detection systems, based on pattern matching and static signatures, are increasingly limited by their need of an up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge base. Data mining techniques have been successfully applied in host-based intrusion detection. Applying data mining techniques on raw network data, however, is made difficult by the sheer size of the input; this is usually avoided by discarding the network packet contents.In this paper, we introduce a two-tier architecture to overcome this problem: the first tier is an unsupervised clustering algorithm which reduces the network packets payload to a tractable size. The second tier is a traditional anomaly detection algorithm, whose efficiency is improved by the availability of data on the packet payload content.

/pdf/unsupervised-learning-techniques-for-an-intrusion-detection-232esegv7h.pdf

Unsupervised learning techniques for an intrusion detection system

Modern botnets rely on domain-generation algorithms (DGAs) to build resilient command-and-control infrastructures. Given the prevalence of this mechanism, recent work has focused on the analysis of DNS traffic to recognize botnets based on their DGAs. While previous work has concentrated on detection, we focus on supporting intelligence operations. We propose Phoenix, a mechanism that, in addition to telling DGA- and non-DGA-generated domains apart using a combination of string and IP-based features, characterizes the DGAs behind them, and, most importantly, finds groups of DGA-generated domains that are representative of the respective botnets. As a result, Phoenix can associate previously unknown DGA-generated domains to these groups, and produce novel knowledge about the evolving behavior of each tracked botnet. We evaluated Phoenix on 1,153,516 domains, including DGA-generated domains from modern, well-known botnets: without supervision, it correctly distinguished DGA- vs. non-DGA-generated domains in 94.8 percent of the cases, characterized families of domains that belonged to distinct DGAs, and helped researchers “on the field” in gathering intelligence on suspicious domains to identify the correct botnet.

/pdf/phoenix-dga-based-botnet-tracking-and-intelligence-543qcqizol.pdf

Phoenix: DGA-Based Botnet Tracking and Intelligence ∗

Preventive and reactive security measures can only partially mitigate the damage caused by modern ransomware attacks. Indeed, the remarkable amount of illicit profit and the cyber-criminals' increasing interest in ransomware schemes suggest that a fair number of users are actually paying the ransoms. Unfortunately, pure-detection approaches (e.g., based on analysis sandboxes or pipelines) are not sufficient nowadays, because often we do not have the luxury of being able to isolate a sample to analyze, and when this happens it is already too late for several users! We believe that a forward-looking solution is to equip modern operating systems with practical self-healing capabilities against this serious threat. Towards such a vision, we propose ShieldFS, an add-on driver that makes the Windows native filesystem immune to ransomware attacks. For each running process, ShieldFS dynamically toggles a protection layer that acts as a copy-on-write mechanism, according to the outcome of its detection component. Internally, ShieldFS monitors the low-level filesystem activity to update a set of adaptive models that profile the system activity over time. Whenever one or more processes violate these models, their operations are deemed malicious and the side effects on the filesystem are transparently rolled back. We designed ShieldFS after an analysis of billions of low-level, I/O filesystem requests generated by thousands of benign applications, which we collected from clean machines in use by real users for about one month. This is the first measurement on the filesystem activity of a large set of benign applications in real working conditions. We evaluated ShieldFS in real-world working conditions on real, personal machines, against samples from state of the art ransomware families. ShieldFS was able to detect the malicious activity at runtime and transparently recover all the original files. Although the models can be tuned to fit various filesystem usage profiles, our results show that our initial tuning yields high accuracy even on unseen samples and variants.

/pdf/shieldfs-a-self-healing-ransomware-aware-filesystem-3jm6enx580.pdf

ShieldFS: a self-healing, ransomware-aware filesystem

In ransomware attacks, the actual target is the human, as opposed to the classic attacks that abuse the infected devices e.g., botnet renting, information stealing. Mobile devices are by no means immune to ransomware attacks. However, there is little research work on this matter and only traditional protections are available. Even state-of-the-art mobile malware detection approaches are ineffective against ransomware apps because of the subtle attack scheme. As a consequence, the ample attack surface formed by the billion mobile devices is left unprotected.

First, in this work we summarize the results of our analysis of the existing mobile ransomware families, describing their common characteristics. Second, we present HelDroid, a fast, efficient and fully automated approach that recognizes known and unknown scareware and ransomware samples from goodware. Our approach is based on detecting the "building blocks" that are typically needed to implement a mobile ransomware application. Specifically, HelDroid detects, in a generic way, if an app is attempting to lock or encrypt the device without the user's consent, and if ransom requests are displayed on the screen. Our technique works without requiring that a sample of a certain family is available beforehand.

We implemented HelDroid and tested it on real-world Android ransomware samples. On a large dataset comprising hundreds of thousands of APKs including goodware, malware, scareware, and ransomware, HelDroid exhibited nearly zero false positives and the capability of recognizing unknown ransomware samples.

HelDroid: Dissecting and Detecting Mobile Ransomware

We describe an unsupervised host-based intrusion detection system based on system call arguments and sequences. We define a set of anomaly detection models for the individual parameters of the call. We then describe a clustering process that helps to better fit models to system call arguments and creates interrelations among different arguments of a system call. Finally, we add a behavioral Markov model in order to capture time correlations and abnormal behaviors. The whole system needs no prior knowledge input; it has a good signal-to-noise ratio, and it is also able to correctly contextualize alarms, giving the user more information to understand whether a true or false positive happened, and to detect global variations over the entire execution flow, as opposed to punctual ones over individual instances.

/pdf/detecting-intrusions-through-system-call-sequence-and-246eh8afkv.pdf

Stefano Zanero

Papers

Unsupervised learning techniques for an intrusion detection system

Phoenix: DGA-Based Botnet Tracking and Intelligence ∗

ShieldFS: a self-healing, ransomware-aware filesystem

HelDroid: Dissecting and Detecting Mobile Ransomware

Detecting Intrusions through System Call Sequence and Argument Analysis