Multi-Granularity User Anomalous Behavior Detection

Abstract

Insider threats pose significant risks to organizational security, often going undetected due to their familiarity with the systems. Detection of insider threats faces challenges of imbalanced data distributions and difficulties in fine-grained detection. Specifically, anomalous users and anomalous behaviors take up a very small fraction of all insider behavior data, making precise detection of anomalous users challenging. Moreover, not all behaviors of anomalous users are anomalous, so it is difficult to detect their behaviors by standardizing with single rules or models. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel approach for insider threat detection, leveraging machine learning techniques to conduct multi-granularity anomaly detection. We introduce the Multi-Granularity User Anomalous Behavior Detection (MG-UABD) system, which combines coarse-grained and fine-grained anomaly detection to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of detecting anomalous behaviors. The coarse-grained module screens all of the user activities to identify potential anomalies, while the fine-grained module focuses on specific anomalous users to refine the detection process. Besides, MG-UABD employs a combination of oversampling and undersampling techniques to address the imbalance in the datasets, ensuring robust model performance. Through extensive experimentation on the commonly used dataset CERT R4.2, we demonstrate that the MG-UABD system achieves superior detection rate and precision. Compared to the suboptimal model, the accuracy has increased by 3.1% and the detection rate has increased by 4.1%. Our findings suggest that a multi-granularity approach for anomaly detection, combined with tailored sampling strategies, is highly effective in addressing insider threats.

Keywords

• insider threat detection
• UEBA
• anomaly detection
• random forest