Automated detection of masquerade attacks with AI and decoy documents

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Authors
Berdychowski, Matt
Salinas Monroy, Sergio A.
Advisors
Issue Date
2024-12-13
Type
Conference paper
Keywords
Artificial intelligence , Cybersecurity , Decoy documents , Hacker , Honeyfiles , Masquerade attack , Phishing
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Citation
M. Berdychowski and S. A. Salinas Monroy, "Automated Detection of Masquerade Attacks with AI and Decoy Documents," 2024 Cyber Awareness and Research Symposium (CARS), Grand Forks, ND, USA, 2024, pp. 1-6
Abstract

Adversaries can launch masquerade attacks by stealing user credentials and then logging into a system, pretending to be the compromised user. These attacks are particularly challenging to detect, because the adversaries have the same permissions as the users they impersonate. Previous works have shown that masquerade attacks can be detected by deploying decoy documents on the users' computers. Since decoy documents are, in general, only accessed by attackers, they can be used to detect masquerade attacks. However, previous works lack data generated by real-world adversaries and do not propose detection mechanisms. To address this challenge, we design effective machine learning masquerade attack detection models. The models are trained using data from our previous real-world experiment, which includes real cybercriminal interactions with a honeyfile server. We find that our machine learning models are able to detect masquerade attacks in a real-world scenario with an accuracy of at least 98%. © 2024 IEEE.

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Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Journal
Book Title
Series
2024 Cyber Awareness and Research Symposium, CARS 2024
28 October 2024 through 29 October 2024
205126
PubMed ID
ISSN
EISSN