Detection of malicious network activity

Abstract

A method of monitoring network traffic in a communication network with a sentinel module to detect malicious activity is described. A gateway sentinel module receives network traffic directed through a gateway installed for a local distribution of the network, the gateway connecting the local distribution of the network to a core of the network. Malicious activity in the local distribution is detected based on a combination of: a local machine-learning model for identifying malicious activity in the local distribution, the local machine-learning model modelling network traffic from the local distribution; and a global machine-learning model. The global machine-learning model models network traffic from a plurality of local distributions of the network based training data from a plurality of local sentinel modules executed on a respective plurality of computing nodes. The computing nodes respectively receive network traffic from the plurality of location distributions. A corresponding device and system are also described.