Dr. Shneiderman demonstrated for us several amazing data analysis tools which have been developed at the HCIL, including LifeLines and EventFlow, two tools designed for temporal analysis and visualization of events. While these tools were designed to analyze medical events around patient care, I wondered if they could also be applied to analyze patterns used by attackers against my honeypots.
The first step was to take all of my honeypot logs and turn them into something EventFlow could understand. I imported the logs into Splunk, and started identifying fields. After careful consideration, the only fields I really care about for this analysis are the session number, source IP address, and the main commands being entered by the attacker, such as "who" "ls" "rm" etc. I combined the source IP and session number to create a session ID, so that EventFlow would treat each connection by each IP address separately.
