Summary
This chapter showed the process of using visual methods to analyze security data. It focused on the analysis process rather than discussing the data feeds and how they can be collected or processed. We looked at two main topics of visual analysis: historical and real-time analysis. I discussed four areas of historical analysis, covering reporting, time-series visualization, interactive analysis, and forensic analysis. The discussion of these various methods has shown that there are multiple approaches to understanding log data. One powerful tool is interactive analysis of logs. The discussion introduced an extension of the information seeking mantra to include an iterative step of refining graph attributes and filters. I then discussed the forensic analysis of log data for three different use-cases: discovering attacks, attack assessment, and incident reporting. Attack detection was done using a process that should be followed to investigate log files. It helped us not just detecting attacks, but also correlating different log sources.
After the aspects of historical log analysis were covered, I shifted to the real-time use-case. The main portion of this section was covered by discussing dashboards to communicate real-time information to help consumer of the dashboards make more accurate and timely decisions. The chapter ended with a short discussion about situational awareness, which is a special case of dashboards that links the real-time data to, for the most part, geographical locations.