Detecting Reconnaissance and Discovery Tactics from the MITRE ATT&CK Framework in Zeek Conn Logs Using Spark's Machine Learning in the Big Data Framework

While computer networks and the massive amount of communication taking place on these networks grow, the amount of damage that can be done by network intrusions grows in tandem. The need is for an effective and scalable intrusion detection system (IDS) to address these potential damages that come with the growth of these networks. A great deal of contemporary research on near real-time IDS focuses on applying machine learning classifiers to labeled network intrusion datasets, but these datasets need be relevant pertaining to the currency of the network intrusions. This paper focuses on a newly created dataset, UWF-ZeekData22, that analyzes data from Zeek's Connection Logs collected using Security Onion 2 network security monitor and labelled using the MITRE ATT&CK framework TTPs. Due to the volume of data, Spark, in the big data framework, was used to run many of the well-known classifiers (naïve Bayes, random forest, decision tree, support vector classifier, gradient boosted trees, and logistic regression) to classify the reconnaissance and discovery tactics from this dataset. In addition to looking at the performance of these classifiers using Spark, scalability and response time were also analyzed.