Terrain and behavior modeling for projecting multistage cyber attacks
Daniel Schnetzer Fava, Jared Holsopple, Shanchieh Jay Yang, Brian Argauer · 2007
Contributions from the information fusion community have enabled comprehensible traces of intrusion alerts occurring on computer networks. Traced or tracked cyber attacks are the bases for threat projection in this work. Due to its complexity, we separate threat projection into two sub-tasks: predicting likely next targets and predicting attacker behavior. A virtual cyber terrain is proposed for identifying likely targets. Overlaying traced alerts onto the cyber terrain reveals exposed vulnerabilities, services, and hosts. Meanwhile, a novel attempt to extract cyber attack behavior is discussed. Leveraging traditional work on prediction and compression, this work identities behavior patterns from traced cyber attack data. The extracted behavior patterns are expected to further refine projections deduced from the cyber terrain.