To assure cyber security of an enterprise, typically SIEM (Security
Information and Event Management) system is in place to normalize security
event from different preventive technologies and flag alerts. Analysts in the
security operation center (SOC) investigate the alerts to decide if it is truly
malicious or not. However, generally the number of alerts is overwhelming with
majority of them being false positive and exceeding the SOC's capacity to
handle all alerts. There is a great need to reduce the false positive rate as
much as possible. While most previous research focused on network intrusion
detection, we focus on risk detection and propose an intelligent Deep Belief
Network machine learning system. The system leverages alert information,
various security logs and analysts' investigation results in a real enterprise
environment to flag hosts that have high likelihood of being compromised. Text
mining and graph based method are used to generate targets and create features
for machine learning. In the experiment, Deep Belief Network is compared with
other machine learning algorithms, including multi-layer neural network, random
forest, support vector machine and logistic regression. Results on real
enterprise data indicate that the deep belief network machine learning system
performs better than other algorithms for our problem and is six times more
effective than current rule-based system. We also implement the whole system
from data collection, label creation, feature engineering to host score
generation in a real enterprise production environment.