VAST 2012 Mini-Challenge 2: Chart- and Matrix-based approach to network operations forensics

We report the approach and results on the VAST 2012 MiniChallenge 2: Bank of Money Regional Office Network Operations Forensics. Using commercial data mining, visualization and database software such as KNIME, Tableau and MySQL as well as a custom-written source vs. destination IP pixel matrix, our team of students identified suspicious IRC traffic, an attack on the firewall, a drop in the firewall connections, an attempt for sensitive information exchange and a possible Distributed Denial-of-Service attack executed partly from a host within the bank network.