This recent Slashdot article resurrected ideas about the mind’s ability to detect change in familiar systems, even very complicated ones. Slashdot links to an IBM developerWorks article.
If you want to create a soundscape from a network, there is the Peep toolkit. In their examples the background network is a babbling brook and key actions are bird chirps. By tuning these effects for your network under normal conditions, you create a (hopefully pleasant) reference soundscape. An increase in owl-hooting may alert you to a spike in bad password attempts.
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