Machine learning plays an increasingly significant role in the building of Network Intrusion Detection Systems. However, machine learning models trained with imbalanced cybersecurity data cannot recognize minority data, hence attacks, effectively. One way to address this issue is to use resampling, which adjusts the ratio between the different classes, making the data more balanced. This research looks at resampling’s influence on the performance of Artificial Neural Network multi-class classifiers. The resampling methods, random undersampling, random oversampling, random undersampling and random oversampling, random undersampling with Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique, and random undersampling with Adaptive Synthetic Sampling Method were used on benchmark Cybersecurity datasets, KDD99, UNSW-NB15, UNSW-NB17 and UNSW-NB18. Macro precision, macro recall, macro F1-score were used to evaluate the results. The patterns found were: First, oversampling increases the training time and undersampling decreases the training time; second, if the data is extremely imbalanced, both oversampling and undersampling increase recall significantly; third, if the data is not extremely imbalanced, resampling will not have much of an impact; fourth, with resampling, mostly oversampling, more of the minority data (attacks) were detected.

With the rapid rate at which networking technologies are changing, there is a need to regularly update network activity datasets to accurately reflect the current state of network infrastructure/traffic. The uniqueness of this work was that this was the first network dataset collected using Zeek and labelled using the MITRE ATT&CK framework. In addition to identifying attack traffic, the MITRE ATT&CK framework allows for the detection of adversary behavior leading to an attack. It can also be used to develop user profiles of groups intending to perform attacks. This paper also outlined how both the cyber range and hadoop’s big data platform were used for creating this network traffic data repository. The data was collected using Security Onion in two formats: Zeek and PCAPs. Mission logs, which contained the MITRE ATT&CK data, were used to label the network attack data. The data was transferred daily from the Security Onion virtual machine running on a cyber range to the big-data platform, Hadoop’s distributed file system. This dataset, UWF-ZeekData22, is publicly available at datasets.uwf.edu.

While computer networks and the massive amount of communication taking place on these networks grow, the amount of damage that can be done by network intrusions grows in tandem. The need is for an effective and scalable intrusion detection system (IDS) to address these potential damages that come with the growth of these networks. A great deal of contemporary research on near real-time IDS focuses on applying machine learning classifiers to labeled network intrusion datasets, but these datasets need be relevant pertaining to the currency of the network intrusions. This paper focuses on a newly created dataset, UWF-ZeekData22, that analyzes data from Zeek’s Connection Logs collected using Security Onion 2 network security monitor and labelled using the MITRE ATT&CK framework TTPs. Due to the volume of data, Spark, in the big data framework, was used to run many of the well-known classifiers (naïve Bayes, random forest, decision tree, support vector classifier, gradient boosted trees, and logistic regression) to classify the reconnaissance and discovery tactics from this dataset. In addition to looking at the performance of these classifiers using Spark, scalability and response time were also analyzed.

In this paper, the authors present an architecture and implementation of a distributed database system using sharding to provide high availability, fault-tolerance, and scalability of large databases in the cloud. Sharding, or horizontal partitioning, is used to disperse the data among the data nodes located on commodity servers for effective management of big data on the cloud.