VEGAS: Visualizing, exploring and grouping alerts

The large quantities of alerts generated by intrusion detection systems (IDS) make very difficult to distinguish on a network real threats from noise. To help solving this problem, we propose VEGAS, an alerts visualization and classification tool that allows first line security operators to group alerts visually based on their principal component analysis (PCA) representation. VEGAS is included in a workflow in such a way that once a set of similar alerts has been collected and diagnosed, a filter is generated that redirects forthcoming similar alerts to other security analysts that are specifically in charge of this set of alerts, in effect reducing the flow of raw undiagnosed alerts.