Training a model to detect malicious command and control cloud

Abstract

The technology disclosed relates to a method, system, and non-transitory computer-readable media that trains a cloud traffic classifier to classify cross-application communications as malicious command and control (C2) traffic or benign cloud traffic. The training uses blocks of malicious Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) transactions targeted at a plurality of cloud applications by a plurality of clients prequalified as malicious command and control (C2) cloud traffic, and also blocks of benign HTTP transactions targeted at the plurality of cloud applications by the plurality of clients prequalified as benign cloud traffic. A cloud traffic classifier is trained on the cross-application malicious training example set and on the cross-application benign training example set by processing the blocks of the malicious and benign HTTP transactions as inputs, and generating outputs that classify the training examples as respectively malicious C2 cloud traffic or benign cloud traffic.