Malicious Activity Against an HPC Service Environment Exhibits a Power-Law-Like Frequency Distribution

Abstract

Many researchers often use the HPC (High Performance Computing) service at KISTI via advanced high-speed network technology. In particular, the 4th Supercomputer at KISTI provides HPC services through an internet connection via 10-Gbps high-speed networks. However, there has been an increasing number of cyberattacks targeting the supercomputing services every year. In this study, based on the collected data, we show that the number of cyberattacks against KISTI supercomputing services is increasing every year. In addition, we show that this malicious activity appears to follow a power-law distribution by categorizing the source IP addresses of these attacks based on the originating country and analyzing the frequency of these attacks.