When fighting the good cyber-fight, one often has to process domain names. Our good friend @alexcpsec was in need of Punycode/IDNA processing in R which begat the newly-minted punycode R package. Much of the following has been culled from open documentation, so if you are already “in the know” ... [Read more...]

Work has kept myself & @jayjacobs quite busy of late, but a small data set posted by @jw_sec this morning made for an opportunity for a quick blog post to show how to do some data maniupation and visualization in R for both security and non-security folk (hey, this may ... [Read more...]

Jay & I cover dashboards in Chapter 10 of Data-Driven Security (the book) but have barely mentioned them on the blog. That’s about to change with a new series on building dashboards using the all-new shinydashboard framework developed by RStudio. While we won’t duplicate the full content from the book, ... [Read more...]

While there’s an unholy affinity in the infosec commuinty with slapping IPv4 addresses onto a world map, that isn’t the only way to spatially visualize IP addresses. A better approach (when tabluation with bar charts, tables or other standard visualization techniques won’t do) is to map IPv4 ... [Read more...]

Since the previous post was fairly popular, I went ahead and built a small shell script (also below) to ease the process of building the OS X Shiny-gist application. After copying the script to a place you can run it from in your PATH and executing a “chmod a+x ... [Read more...]

I was playing with some non-security-oriented R+Shiny code the other day, and thought that Shiny apps would be even more useful if they were double-clickable applications that you could “just run”—provided R was installed on the target system—vs have to cut/paste code into R. Now, I ... [Read more...]

Gallup released the results of their annual “Crime” poll in their Social Poll series this week and spent much time highlighting the fact that “cyber” was at the top of the list. (There’s nary a visualization on the Gallup post or in the accompanying PDF, so keep that graphic ... [Read more...]

UPDATE Per the author, a devtools::install_github("hadley/devtools") should take care of everything you need prior to installing the latest dplyr (though I did not have postgres libs installed and suspect that might still be needed). The R dplyr package just turned 0.3 and to get it working in ... [Read more...]

We leave the Jolly Roger behind this year and turn our piRate spyglass towards the digital seas and take a look at piRated movies as seen through the lens of TorrentFreak. The seasoned seadogs who pilot that ship have been doing a weekly “Top 10 Pirated Movies of the Week” post ... [Read more...]

I was offline much of the day Tuesday and completely missed Hadley Wickham’s tweet about the new rvest package: Are you an #rstats user who misses python's beautiful soup? Please try out rvest (http://t.co/PeiIHr3jDW) and let me know what you think.— Hadley Wickham (@hadleywickham) September 12, 2014 ... [Read more...]

Karl Broman did a spiffy job summarizing a good number of the options available to R folk if they want to get notifications from R. You can also generate OS X notifications as well. If you’re using Slack for team coordination and communications, you’ve got a new option ... [Read more...]

I saw this on Hacker News this morning and it got me curious as to how many other TLDs (e.g. .com) resolve to an address (i.e. http://uz./ displays a page in your browser since uz. resolves to 91.212.89.8). This is quick work with R and the resolv & iptools ... [Read more...]

UPDATE The statebins package is now available on CRAN I became enamored (OK, obsessed) with a recent visualization by the WaPo team which @ryanpitts tweeted and dubbed statebins: Statebins! RT @kevinschaul: States with the most jobs lost or threatened because of trade. http://t.co/r1pJhudpz3 pic.twitter.com/... [Read more...]

The dtupdate package has functions that attempt to figure out which packages have non-CRAN versions (currently only looks for github ones) and then tries to figure out which ones have updates (i.e. the github version is __ local version). It provides an option (not recommended) to auto-update any packages with ... [Read more...]

Sometimes you need to get to a command prompt from R, whether it’s to wrangle git on the command line or do some package work. RStudio provides ways to do this from menus and hotkeys, but on OS X it sticks you in Terminal.app. I’m an iTerm ... [Read more...]

Thanks to a blog comment by @arj, I finally ran at least one of the new Rcpp-based through valgrind (resolv) and, sure enough there were a few memory leaks which are now fixed. However, I first ran valgind with a simple test R script that just did library(stats) to ... [Read more...]

We’ve got some new and updated R packages that are (hopefully) helpful to security folks who are endeavouring to use R in their quest to find and prevent malicious activity. All packages now incorporate a testthat workflow and are fully roxygen-ized and present some best practices in R package ... [Read more...]

Back in April, we showed you how to use a C resolver library to make many different kinds of DNS lookups. More oft than not, such complete functionality is not necessary, but R still only provides nsl to get an IPv4 address of a given hostname, which is woefully inadequate. ... [Read more...]

I’ve been using RStudio’s new ability to run Python scripts since I often need to analyze/process data in R but then run web services with said data in Python (usually via Flask). I’d rather live with the foibles of the RStudio editor than use a separate ... [Read more...]

This is the second of a two-part series. Part 1 set up the story and goes into how to discover, digest & reformat the necessary data. This concluding segment will show how to perform some basic visualizations and then how to build beautiful & informative density maps from the data and offer some ... [Read more...]