Anomalous File System Activity Detection Through Temporal Association Rule Mining

M. Reza H. Iman, Pavel Chikul, Gert Jervan, Hayretdin Bahsi, Tara Ghasempouri

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

NTFS USN Journal tracks all the changes in the files, directories, and streams of a volume for various reasons including backup. Although this data source has been considered a significant artifact for digital forensic investigations, the utilization of this source for automatic malicious behavior detection is less explored. This paper applies temporal association rule mining to data obtained from the NTFS USN Journal for malicious behavior detection. The proposed method extracts association rules from two data sources, the first one with normal behavior and the second one with a malicious one. The obtained rules, which have embedded the sequence of information, are compared with respect to their support and confidence values to identify the ones indicating malicious behavior. The method is applied to a ransomware case to demonstrate its feasibility in finding relevant rules based on USN journal activities.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationICISSP 2023 - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
EditorsPaolo Mori, Gabriele Lenzini, Steven Furnell
PublisherScience and Technology Publications, Lda
Pages733-740
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9789897586248
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Externally publishedYes
Event9th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy, ICISSP 2023 - Lisbon, Portugal
Duration: Feb 22 2023Feb 24 2023

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
ISSN (Electronic)2184-4356

Conference

Conference9th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy, ICISSP 2023
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityLisbon
Period2/22/232/24/23

Keywords

  • Anomaly Detection
  • Association Rule Mining
  • Forensics
  • NTFS
  • Pattern Recognition
  • USN Journal

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science (miscellaneous)
  • Information Systems

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