ZeroAccess Bots Desperately Seeking Freedom (Visualization)

I’ve been doing a bit of graphing (with real, non-honeypot network data) as part of the research for the book I’m writing with @jayjacobs and thought one of the images was worth sharing (especially since it may not make it into the book :-).

Threat_View
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This is a static screen capture of a D3 force-directed graph made with R, igraph & Vega of four ZeroAccess infected nodes desperately (each node tried ~200K times over a couple days) trying to break free of a firewall over the course of 11 days. The red nodes are unique destination IPs and purple ones are in the AlienVault IP Reputation database. Jay & I have read and blogged a great deal about ZeroAccess over the past year and finally had the chance to see a live slice of how pervasive (and, noisy) the network is even with just a view from a few infected nodes.

While the above graphic is the composite view of all 11 days, the following one is from just a single day with only two infected nodes trying to communicate out (this is a pure, hastily-crafted R/igraph image):

Two ZeroAccess Infected Nodes
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There are some common destinations among the two, but each has a large list of unique ones; even the best, open IP reputation database on the planet only included a handful of the malicious endpoints, which means you really need to be looking at holistic behavior modeling vs port/destination alone (I filtered out legit destination traffic for these views) if you’re trying to find egressing badness (but you hopefully already knew that).

Cover image from Data-Driven Security
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