• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.97-110
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• 2004

As modem web services become enormously complex, web attacks has become frequent and serious. Existing security solutions such as firewalls or signature-based intrusion detection systems are generally inadequate in securing web services, and analysis of raw web log data is simply impractical for most organizations. Visual display of "interpreted" web logs, with emphasis on anomalous web requests, is essential for an organization to efficiently track web usage patterns and detect possible web attacks. In this paper, we discuss various issues related to effective real-time visualization of web usage patterns and anomalies. We implemented a software tool named SAD (session anomaly detection) Viewer to satisfy such need and conducted an empirical study in which anomalous web traffics such as Misuse attacks, DoS attacks, Code-Red worms and Whisker scans were injected. Our study confirms that SAD Viewer is useful in assisting web security engineers to monitor web usage patterns in general and anomalous web sessions in particular.articular.