Spike in Network Traffic

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A machine learning job detected an unusually large spike in network traffic. Such a burst of traffic, if not caused by a surge in business activity, can be due to suspicious or malicious activity. Large-scale data exfiltration may produce a burst of network traffic; this could also be due to unusually large amounts of reconnaissance or enumeration traffic. Denial-of-service attacks or traffic floods may also produce such a surge in traffic.

Rule type: machine_learning

Machine learning job: high_count_network_events

Machine learning anomaly threshold: 75

Severity: low

Risk score: 21

Runs every: 15 minutes

Searches indices from: now-30m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Network
  • Threat Detection
  • ML

Version: 2 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.13.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 7.14.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Potential false positives

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Business workflows that occur very occasionally, and involve an unsual surge in network trafic, can trigger this alert. A new business workflow or a surge in business activity may trigger this alert. A misconfigured network application or firewall may trigger this alert.

Rule version history

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Version 2 (7.14.0 release)
  • Formatting only