Security Visualization
by Raffael Marty

Raffael Marty is chief security strategist and senior product manager at Splunk. Fully immersed in industry initiatives, standards efforts and activities, Raffy lives and breathes security and visualization. He is the author of 'Applied Security Visualization,' published Aug 1, 2008 by Addison-Wesley Professional.

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How do you prepare your security data for visualization?

Do you know how much traffic is transmitted on your networks? Do you know what protocols are in use and what machines are using them? Are there spyware infected machines on your network that leak information?
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How do you visualize your traffic flow (NetFlow) logs?

What are you doing with your traffic flow logs, such as NetFlow? How long does it normally take you to understand what exactly the log entries represent? What if you could generate a visual representation of the machines communicating on your network? Would that make your analysis work easier?

How do you create good visualizations?

I am sure you have seen graphs that were just horrible to look at. Even worse, it was almost impossible to determine what the graph was trying to communicate. One of the first things you should learn - before you even go ahead and generate a graph - are some simple visualization principles.

What is the right graph to use in what situation?

Do you like pie charts? Have you ever thought about replacing them with a bar chart? Or a line chart? Do you know when to use what chart?
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How do you encode hundreds of data points into one single graph? Use Sparklines.

Have you tried to visualize your traffic flows? Did you have the problem that your graphs got really cluttered? Did you find a way around that problem? Did you filter data? Did you aggregate multiple nodes into one?
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Maturity Scale for IT Data Management

How does the IT data management -- the market that is an umbrella for log management, security information management, and security event management -- look? What are some of the implications based on the maturity scale? Why do some SIM/SEM projects fail and others don't? Are you ripe for advanced analytics and visualization?

How Do You Get Started With Security Visualization?

Are you in charge of analyzing large amounts of security data? Have you ever wondered whether there is a better way than reading your logs line by line? Here are some starting points on how to visualize your security data.
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