Visual Analytics Workshop Is Back at BlackHat 2014

OVERVIEW

Big data and security intelligence are the two hot topics in security for 2014. We are collecting more and more information from both the infrastructure, but increasingly also directly from our applications. This vast amount of data gets increasingly hard to understand. Terms like map reduce, hadoop, mongodb, etc. are part of many discussions. But what are those technologies? And what do they have to do with security intelligence? We will see that none of these technologies are sufficient in our quest to defend our networks and information. Data visualization is the only approach that scales to the ever changing threat landscape and infrastructure configurations. Using big data data visualization techniques, you can gain a far deeper understanding of what's happening on your network right now. You can uncover hidden patterns of data, identify emerging vulnerabilities and attacks, and respond decisively with countermeasures that are far more likely to succeed than conventional methods. The attendees will learn about log analysis, big data, information visualization, data sources for IT security, and learn how to generate visual representations of IT data. The training is filled with hands-on exercises utilizing the yet to be released DAVIX 2014 live CD.

Here is what students said about the BlackHat 2013 workshop:

SYLLABUS

Log Analysis

• Data sources
• Data Analysis and Visualization Linux (DAVIX)
• Log data processing

Log Management and SIEM

• Log management and SIEM overview
• Application logging guidelines
• Logging as a service
• Big data - Hadoop, Lucene, ElasticSearch

Visualization

• Information visualization history
• Visualization theory
• Data visualization tools and libraries
• Visualization resources

Security Visualization

• Perimeter threat use-cases
• Network flow data
• Firewall data
• IDS/IPS data
• Proxy data
• User activity
• Host-based data analysis

Sample of Tools and Techniques

Tools to gather data:

• tcpdump and wireshark to analyze packet captures
• argus, nfdump, nfsen, and silk to process traffic flows
• snort, bro, suricata as intrusion detection systems
• p0f, npad for passive network analysis
• iptables, pf, pix as examples of firewalls

We are also using a number of visualization tools to analyze example data in the labs:

• graphviz, tulip, cytoscape, and gephi
• afterglow
• treemap
• mondrian, ggobi

Under the log management section, we are going to discuss:

• rsyslog, syslog-ng, nxlog
• logstash, graylog
• commercial log management and SIEM solutions

The section on big data is covering the following:

• hadoop (HDFS, map-reduce, HBase, Hive, Impala, Zookeper)
• search engines like: elastic search, Solr
• key-value stores like MongoDB, Cassandra, etc.
• OLAP and OLTP

TRAINER

Raffael Marty is one of the world’s most recognized authorities on security data analytics. Raffy is the founder and CEO of pixlcloud, the next generation data visualization platform for big data. With a track record at companies including IBM Research and ArcSight, he is thoroughly familiar with established practices and emerging trends in data analytics. He has served as Chief Security Strategist with Splunk and was a co-founder of Loggly, a cloud-based log management solution. Author of 'Applied Security Visualization' and frequent speaker at academic and industry events, Raffy is a leading thinker and advocate of visualization for unlocking insights into data. For more than 14 years, Raffy has lived in the security and log management space to help Fortune 500 companies defend themselves against sophisticated adversaries and train organizations around the world in the art of data visualization for security. Practicing zen has become an important part of Raffy's life.