A visual analytics field experiment to evaluate alternative visualizations for cyber security applications

The analysis and exploration of emerging threats in the Internet is important to better understand the behaviour of attackers and develop new methods to enhance cyber security. Fully automated algorithms alone are often not capable of providing actionable insights about the threat landscape. We therefore combine a multi-criteria clustering algorithm, tailor-made for the identification of such attack campaigns with three interactive visualizations, namely treemap representations, interactive node-link diagrams, and chord diagrams, to allow the analysts to visually explore and make sense of the resulting multi-dimensional clusters. To demonstrate the potential of the system, we share our lessons learned in conducting a field experiment with experts in a security response team and show how it helped them to gain new insights into various threat landscapes.