Towards Visual Cyber Security Analytics for the Masses

Abstract

Understanding network activity and cyber threats is of major concern these days, for business and private users alike. As more and more online applications assist us in our daily life, there is a growing potential vulnerability to cyber crime. With this paper, we want to share our vision of cyber security analytics becoming an accessible everyday task through visual analysis tools. We describe the context of this vision and our experience with the first achievements in this direction. With our new prototype, anyone can analyze their network traffic logs and get security-relevant information out of it, a task that was too difficult and sometimes too expensive in the past. We present an open, accessible and user-friendly visual network analyzer for PCAP (packet capture) files, critically discuss our first prototype, and give an outlook to anomaly detection supported by active learning in this context.