After many research efforts, Network Intrusion Detection Systems still have much room for improvement. This paper proposes a novel method for automatic and timely analysis of traffic generated by large networks, which is able to identify malicious external hosts even if their activities do not raise any alert by existing defensive systems. Our proposal focuses on periodic communications, since our experimental evaluation shows that they are more related to malicious activities, and it can be easily integrated with other detection systems. We highlight that periodic network activities can occur at very different intervals ranging from seconds to hours, hence a timely analysis of long time-windows of the traffic generated by large organizations is a challenging task in itself. Existing work is primarily focused on identifying botnets, whereas the method proposed in this paper has a broader target and aims to detect external hosts that are likely involved in any malicious operation. Since malware-related network activities can be considered as rare events in the overall traffic, the output of the proposed method is a manageable graylist of external hosts that are characterized by a considerably higher likelihood of being malicious compared to the entire set of external hosts contacted by the monitored large network. A thorough evaluation on a real large network traffic demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal, which is capable of automatically selecting only dozens of suspicious hosts from hundreds of thousands, thus allowing security operators to focus their analyses on few likely malicious targets.

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