A Study on the Importance of Features in Detecting Advanced Persistent Threats Using Machine Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hallaji, Ehsan, Razavi-Far, Roozbeh, Saif, Mehrdad
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Hallaji, Ehsan
Razavi-Far, Roozbeh
Saif, Mehrdad
author_facet Hallaji, Ehsan
Razavi-Far, Roozbeh
Saif, Mehrdad
contents Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) pose a significant security risk to organizations and industries. These attacks often lead to severe data breaches and compromise the system for a long time. Mitigating these sophisticated attacks is highly challenging due to the stealthy and persistent nature of APTs. Machine learning models are often employed to tackle this challenge by bringing automation and scalability to APT detection. Nevertheless, these intelligent methods are data-driven, and thus, highly affected by the quality and relevance of input data. This paper aims to analyze measurements considered when recording network traffic and conclude which features contribute more to detecting APT samples. To do this, we study the features associated with various APT cases and determine their importance using a machine learning framework. To ensure the generalization of our findings, several feature selection techniques are employed and paired with different classifiers to evaluate their effectiveness. Our findings provide insights into how APT detection can be enhanced in real-world scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07207
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Study on the Importance of Features in Detecting Advanced Persistent Threats Using Machine Learning
Hallaji, Ehsan
Razavi-Far, Roozbeh
Saif, Mehrdad
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) pose a significant security risk to organizations and industries. These attacks often lead to severe data breaches and compromise the system for a long time. Mitigating these sophisticated attacks is highly challenging due to the stealthy and persistent nature of APTs. Machine learning models are often employed to tackle this challenge by bringing automation and scalability to APT detection. Nevertheless, these intelligent methods are data-driven, and thus, highly affected by the quality and relevance of input data. This paper aims to analyze measurements considered when recording network traffic and conclude which features contribute more to detecting APT samples. To do this, we study the features associated with various APT cases and determine their importance using a machine learning framework. To ensure the generalization of our findings, several feature selection techniques are employed and paired with different classifiers to evaluate their effectiveness. Our findings provide insights into how APT detection can be enhanced in real-world scenarios.
title A Study on the Importance of Features in Detecting Advanced Persistent Threats Using Machine Learning
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07207