DATA MINING: TRACKING SUSPICIOUS LOGGING ACTIVITY USING HADOOP

In this modern rather interconnected era, an organization’s top priority is to protect itself from major security breaches occurring frequently within a communicational environment. But, it seems, as if they quite fail in doing so. Every week there are new headlines relating to information being forged, funds being stolen and corrupt usage of credit card and so on. Personal computers are turned into “zombie machines” by hackers to steal confidential and financial information from sources without disclosing hacker’s true identity. These identity thieves rob private data and ruin the very purpose of privacy. The purpose of this project is to identify suspicious user activity by analyzing a log file which then later can help an investigation agency like FBI to track and monitor anonymous user(s) who seek for weaknesses to attack vulnerable parts of a system to have access of it. The project also emphasizes the potential damage that a malicious activity could have on the system. This project uses Hadoop framework to search and store log files for logging activities and then performs a ‘Map Reduce’ programming code to finally compute and analyze the results.