Irregular Communication Patterns


  • Networks typically contain regular patterns of traffic between well-established clients and servers
    • traffic maps reveal these typical data flows
  • When used as a baseline, these maps can help quickly expose client endpoints establishing sessions with one another, Internet hosts, or irregular communication patterns
    • Traffic may show:
      • high bandwidth consumption
      • unusual protocol use
      • or occur at odd times of the day

ARP Spoofing/Poisoning

  • irregular peer-to-peer communication may indicate various kinds of man-in-the-middle attacks (on-path)
  • arp spoofing and arp poisoning redirects an IP address to a MAC address not associated with its proper destination
    • attackers execute this by continuously sending cache update requests to victim with erroneous address information
  • ARP always overwrites its records with the latest request
  • IDS can effectively identify suspicious traffic because ARP poisoning generates much more ARP traffic than normal
  • use arp -a to manually inspect local machine’s ARP cache