CSC-Detector: A System to Infer Large-Scale Probing Campaigns

This paper uniquely leverages unsolicited real darknet data to propose a novel system, CSC-Detector, that aims at identifying Cyber Scanning Campaigns. The latter define a new phenomenon of probing events that are distinguished by their orchestration (i.e., coordination) patterns. To achieve its aim, CSC-Detector adopts three engines. Its fingerprinting engine exploits a unique observation to extract probing activities from darknet traffic. The system’s inference engine employs a set of behavioral analytics to generate numerous significant insights related to the machinery of the probing sources while its analysis engine exploits the previously obtained inferences to automatically infer the campaigns. CSC-Detector is empirically evaluated and validated using 240 GB of real darknet data. The outcome discloses 3 recent, previously unreported large-scale probing campaigns targeting diverse Internet services. Further, one of those inferred campaigns revealed that the sipscan campaign that was initially analyzed by CAIDA is arguably still active, yet operating in a stealthy, very low rate mode. We envision that the proposed system that is tailored towards darknet data, which is frequently, abundantly and effectively used to generate cyber threat intelligence, could be used by network security analysts, emergency response teams and/or observers of cyber events to infer large-scale orchestrated probing campaigns. This would be utilized for early cyber attack warning and notification as well as for simplified analysis and tracking of such events.