Source URL: https://blog.cauchy.org/blog/anywidget/
Source: Hacker News
Title: Visualizing process trees with marimo and anywidget
Feedly Summary: Comments
AI Summary and Description: Yes
Summary: The text discusses the development of a custom interactive process tree visualization tool designed for incident response within cybersecurity. By leveraging various technologies like marimo, anywidget, and D3, it offers analysts a way to effectively visualize process creation events from EDR systems. This approach enhances the understanding of process relationships and supports better investigation of security incidents.
Detailed Description:
This article details the creation of an interactive process tree visualization widget intended for cybersecurity professionals involved in incident response. The work builds on activities at DNB’s Cyber Defense Center and aims to streamline the investigation process through enhanced data visualization.
Key Points:
– **Purpose and Background**:
– The inspiration stems from a need to improve incident response effectiveness by visualizing data from process creation event logs.
– Traditional tools often have limitations, such as lack of customization and availability solely in premium versions, making this project significant for practitioners seeking flexible solutions.
– **Core Development Components**:
– **Technologies Used**:
– **Anywidget**: A framework for custom Jupyter and marimo notebooks.
– **Marimo**: A reactive Python notebook environment for data interaction.
– **Ibis**: A backend-agnostic dataframe library to handle data queries.
– **Apache Spark**: A distributed query engine for handling large datasets.
– **D3 and DependenTree**: Libraries for creating interactive visualizations.
– **Process Visualization Implementation**:
– The system architecture centers on querying device process events, focusing on key fields like Timestamp, DeviceName, and ProcessId.
– The visualization represents process relationships as a tree structure, allowing analysts to correlate processes and their parent-child relationships during investigations.
– **Interactive Features**:
– The widget enables users to filter process events dynamically, visually explore the hierarchical structure, and track selected processes back to relevant details.
– Integration between Python and JavaScript fosters a responsive user experience, allowing real-time updates to the visualization based on user interactions.
– **Future Directions**:
– Improvements suggested include managing processes with many children, refining timeline controls for specific period analyses, and incorporating more contextual metadata to enhance investigations.
This work not only illustrates an innovative approach to visualizing cybersecurity data but also underlines the importance of flexibility and interactivity in tools utilized by incident response teams. The ability to transform raw log data into meaningful visual representations aligns with contemporary requirements for cybersecurity practices, making it a relevant study for professionals in the field.