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Abstract
Cyberattacks have grown into a major risk for organizations, with common
consequences being data theft, sabotage, and extortion. Since preventive
measures do not suffice to repel attacks, timely detection of successful
intruders is crucial to stop them from reaching their final goals. For this
purpose, many organizations utilize Security Information and Event Management
(SIEM) systems to centrally collect security-related events and scan them for
attack indicators using expert-written detection rules. However, as we show by
analyzing a set of widespread SIEM detection rules, adversaries can evade
almost half of them easily, allowing them to perform common malicious actions
within an enterprise network without being detected. To remedy these critical
detection blind spots, we propose the idea of adaptive misuse detection, which
utilizes machine learning to compare incoming events to SIEM rules on the one
hand and known-benign events on the other hand to discover successful evasions.
Based on this idea, we present AMIDES, an open-source proof-of-concept adaptive
misuse detection system. Using four weeks of SIEM events from a large
enterprise network and more than 500 hand-crafted evasions, we show that AMIDES
successfully detects a majority of these evasions without any false alerts. In
addition, AMIDES eases alert analysis by assessing which rules were evaded. Its
computational efficiency qualifies AMIDES for real-world operation and hence
enables organizations to significantly reduce detection blind spots with
moderate effort.