Automated Cyber Situation Awareness Tools and Models for Improving Analyst Performance

An ever increasing number of critical missions rely today on complex Information Technology infrastructures, making such missions vulnerable to a wide range of potentially devastating cyber-attacks. Attackers can exploit network configurations and vulnerabilities to incrementally penetrate a network and compromise critical systems, thus rendering security monitoring and intrusion detection much more challenging. It is also evident from the ever growing number of high-profile cyber-attacks reported in the news that not only are cyber-attacks growing in sophistication but also in numbers. For these reasons, cyber-security analysts need to continuously monitor large amounts of alerts and data from a multitude of sensors in order to detect attacks in a timely manner and mitigate their impact. However—given the inherent complexity of the problem—manual analysis is labor-intensive and error-prone, and distracts the analyst from getting the “big picture” of the cyber situation.