On the path to establishing a global cybersecurity framework where each
enterprise shares information about malicious behavior, an important question
arises. How can a machine learning representation characterizing a cyber attack
on one network be used to detect similar attacks on other enterprise networks
if each networks has wildly different distributions of benign and malicious
traffic? We address this issue by comparing the results of naively transferring
a model across network domains and using CORrelation ALignment, to our novel
adversarial Siamese neural network. Our proposed model learns attack
representations that are more invariant to each network's particularities via
an adversarial approach. It uses a simple ranking loss that prioritizes the
labeling of the most egregious malicious events correctly over average
accuracy. This is appropriate for driving an alert triage workflow wherein an
analyst only has time to inspect the top few events ranked highest by the
model. In terms of accuracy, the other approaches fail completely to detect any
malicious events when models were trained on one dataset are evaluated on
another for the first 100 events. While, the method presented here retrieves
sizable proportions of malicious events, at the expense of some training
instabilities due in adversarial modeling. We evaluate these approaches using 2
publicly available networking datasets, and suggest areas for future research.