Characterizing transition behaviors in Internet attack sequences

Cyber attacks from the Internet often span over multiple ports and multiple hosts. This work hypothesizes that there are distinct sequential patterns revealing hacking behavior. A feature called Attack Transition Action (ATA) is defined to represent the changes on attacked destinations and ports over time. The simplicity of the feature enables the development of a probabilistic model, revealing higher order transitions hidden within the attack sequences. The model trained with a real-world attack dataset uncovers several natural clusters of Internet attack behaviors. The discovered behavior patterns are explained with representative hacking strategies. Our systematic modeling and analysis provides an effective means to characterize classes of Internet attacks.