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Main Authors: Momeni, Sadegh, Zhang, Ge, Huber, Birkett, Harkous, Hamza, Lipton, Sam, Seguin, Benoit, Pavlidis, Yanis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08802
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author Momeni, Sadegh
Zhang, Ge
Huber, Birkett
Harkous, Hamza
Lipton, Sam
Seguin, Benoit
Pavlidis, Yanis
author_facet Momeni, Sadegh
Zhang, Ge
Huber, Birkett
Harkous, Hamza
Lipton, Sam
Seguin, Benoit
Pavlidis, Yanis
contents Despite advancements in machine learning for security, rule-based detection remains prevalent in Security Operations Centers due to the resource intensiveness and skill gap associated with ML solutions. While traditional rule-based methods offer efficiency, their rigidity leads to high false positives or negatives and requires continuous manual maintenance. This paper proposes a novel, two-stage hybrid framework to democratize ML-based threat detection. The first stage employs intentionally loose YARA rules for coarse-grained filtering, optimized for high recall. The second stage utilizes an ML classifier to filter out false positives from the first stage's output. To overcome data scarcity, the system leverages Simula, a seedless synthetic data generation framework, enabling security analysts to create high-quality training datasets without extensive data science expertise or pre-labeled examples. A continuous feedback loop incorporates real-time investigation results to adaptively tune the ML model, preventing rule degradation. This proposed model with active learning has been rigorously tested for a prolonged time in a production environment spanning tens of thousands of systems. The system handles initial raw log volumes often reaching 250 billion events per day, significantly reducing them through filtering and ML inference to a handful of daily tickets for human investigation. Live experiments over an extended timeline demonstrate a general improvement in the model's precision over time due to the active learning feature. This approach offers a self-sustained, low-overhead, and low-maintenance solution, allowing security professionals to guide model learning as expert ``teachers''.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08802
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Democratizing ML for Enterprise Security: A Self-Sustained Attack Detection Framework
Momeni, Sadegh
Zhang, Ge
Huber, Birkett
Harkous, Hamza
Lipton, Sam
Seguin, Benoit
Pavlidis, Yanis
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Despite advancements in machine learning for security, rule-based detection remains prevalent in Security Operations Centers due to the resource intensiveness and skill gap associated with ML solutions. While traditional rule-based methods offer efficiency, their rigidity leads to high false positives or negatives and requires continuous manual maintenance. This paper proposes a novel, two-stage hybrid framework to democratize ML-based threat detection. The first stage employs intentionally loose YARA rules for coarse-grained filtering, optimized for high recall. The second stage utilizes an ML classifier to filter out false positives from the first stage's output. To overcome data scarcity, the system leverages Simula, a seedless synthetic data generation framework, enabling security analysts to create high-quality training datasets without extensive data science expertise or pre-labeled examples. A continuous feedback loop incorporates real-time investigation results to adaptively tune the ML model, preventing rule degradation. This proposed model with active learning has been rigorously tested for a prolonged time in a production environment spanning tens of thousands of systems. The system handles initial raw log volumes often reaching 250 billion events per day, significantly reducing them through filtering and ML inference to a handful of daily tickets for human investigation. Live experiments over an extended timeline demonstrate a general improvement in the model's precision over time due to the active learning feature. This approach offers a self-sustained, low-overhead, and low-maintenance solution, allowing security professionals to guide model learning as expert ``teachers''.
title Democratizing ML for Enterprise Security: A Self-Sustained Attack Detection Framework
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08802