Proactively hunting known attack behaviors within system logs, termed threat hunting, is gaining traction in cybersecurity. Existing methods typically rely on constructing a query graph representing known attack patterns and… Click to show full abstract
Proactively hunting known attack behaviors within system logs, termed threat hunting, is gaining traction in cybersecurity. Existing methods typically rely on constructing a query graph representing known attack patterns and identifying it as a subgraph within a system-wide provenance graph. However, the large scale and redundancy of provenance data lead to poor matching efficiency and high false-positive rates. To address these issues, this paper introduces SGMNet, a supervised seeded graph-matching network designed for efficient and accurate threat hunting. By selecting indicators of compromise (IOCs) as initial seed nodes, SGMNet extracts compact subgraphs from large-scale provenance graphs, significantly reducing graph size and complexity. It then learns adaptive node-expansion strategies to capture relevant context while suppressing irrelevant noise. Experiments on four real-world system log datasets demonstrate that SGMNet achieves a runtime reduction of over 60% compared to baseline methods, while reducing false positives by 35.2% on average. These results validate that SGMNet not only improves computational efficiency but also enhances detection precision, making it well suited for real-time threat hunting in large-scale environments.
               
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