Assessing coordinated malicious behavior towards a service provider network

Abstract

This disclosure describes building a graph that is based on which IP address sources are active in the same time periods. By creating a node for each IP address with some moderate level of suspicious activity and connecting the nodes for any IP addresses that are engaging in that activity at roughly the same time, the graph represents scenarios of possible cooperation between sets of IP addresses. Nodes in this graph and the links between are assigned values based on how much suspicious activity they engage in during each time window. These values decay over time if no new suspicious activity occurs. By analyzing the resulting graph at any particular point in time, how similar two IP addresses have been behaving recently can be measured without having to keep track of their total history of activity over the last time period.