Besides his work as a professor and Director of the Information and Technology and Operations research center, Gregory Conti is also the author of the excellent book Security Data Visualization and the RUMINT visualization tool. His work can be found at gregconti.com.

Introduce the concept of security data visualization to our readers.

Security data visualization seeks to create insightful graphical windows on security datasets, files, file systems, network communications, and logs. It excels at providing big picture context that is impossible using text and simple charting techniques. More importantly, security data visualization is inherently interactive, allowing analysts to take cumbersome data and iteratively study slices of activity and find new and interesting patterns, outliers, and anomalies. If done correctly, the process is fun and powerful, but it is important to avoid the common pitfall of creating just pretty pictures, which while beautiful, don’t provide useful insight.


Visualization is obviously of great significance for analyzing large amounts of data. Many also praise its usefulness when it comes to illustrating security problems to the management. What are the areas in which security visualization comes out as essential?

From my experience it is possible to use visualization to study ten to one hundred times more data than competing manual methods. It is probably possible to increase this gain to one thousand times or more with very well thought out visualization systems. There are number of places that I see visualization as very valuable. Visualization is at its best been you are dealing with the new, unfamiliar or when you don’t really know what you are looking for. It facilitates exploration of data whether in a static dataset or when faced with dynamically changing data, such as in network communications or protocols, particularly those that aren’t well documented.