Patent 9444836 was granted and assigned to AT&T Intellectual Property I on September, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for identifying potential threats on a network based on anomalous behavior in communication between endpoints are provided. Traffic data for a network is accumulated over some period of time. The traffic data is grouped by one or more keys, such as source IP address, and sets of metric values are calculated for the keys. A mixture distribution, such as a negative binomial mixture distribution, is fitted to each set of metric values, and outlying metric values are determined based on the mixture distribution(s). A list of outliers is then generated comprising key values having outlying metric values in one or more of the sets of metric values.