This book is the first publication to give a comprehensive, structured treatment to the important topic of situational awareness in cyber defense. It presents the subject in a logical, consistent, continuous discourse, covering key topics such as formation of cyber situational awareness, visualization and human factors, automated learning and inference, use of ontologies and metrics, predicting and assessing impact of cyber attacks, and achieving resilience of cyber and physical mission. Chapters include case studies, recent research results and practical insights described specifically for this book. Situational awareness is exceptionally prominent in the field of cyber defense. It involves science, technology and practice of perception, comprehension and projection of events and entities in cyber space. Chapters discuss the difficulties of achieving cyber situational awareness – along with approaches to overcoming the difficulties - in the relatively young field of cyber defense where key phenomena are so unlike the more conventional physical world. Cyber Defense and Situational Awareness is designed as a reference for practitioners of cyber security and developers of technology solutions for cyber defenders. Advanced-level students and researchers focused on security of computer networks will also find this book a valuable resource.

Motivation for the Book This book seeks to establish the state of the art in the cyber situational awareness area and to set the course for future research. A multidisciplinary group of leading researchers from cyber security, cognitive science, and decision science areas elab orate on the fundamental challenges facing the research community and identify promising solution paths. Today, when a security incident occurs, the top three questions security admin istrators would ask are in essence: What has happened? Why did it happen? What should I do? Answers to the ?rst two questions form the core of Cyber Situational Awareness. Whether the last question can be satisfactorily answered is greatly de pendent upon the cyber situational awareness capability of an enterprise. A variety of computer and network security research topics (especially some sys tems security topics) belong to or touch the scope of Cyber Situational Awareness. However, the Cyber Situational Awareness capability of an enterprise is still very limited for several reasons: • Inaccurate and incomplete vulnerability analysis, intrusion detection, and foren sics. • Lack of capability to monitor certain microscopic system/attack behavior. • Limited capability to transform/fuse/distill information into cyber intelligence. • Limited capability to handle uncertainty. • Existing system designs are not very “friendly” to Cyber Situational Awareness.

"This book provides academia and organizations insights into practical and applied solutions, frameworks, technologies, and implementations for situational awareness in computer networks"--Provided by publisher.

Today, when a security incident happens, the top three questions a cyber operation center would ask are: What has happened? Why did it happen? What should I do? Answers to the first two questions form the core of Cyber Situation Awareness (SA). Whether the last question can be satisfactorily addressed is largely dependent upon the cyber situation awareness capability of an enterprise. The goal of this book is to present a summary of recent research advances in the development of highly desirable Cyber Situation Awareness capabilities. The 8 invited full papers presented in this volume are organized around the following topics: computer-aided human centric cyber situation awareness; computer and information science aspects of the recent advances in cyber situation awareness; learning and decision making aspects of the recent advances in cyber situation awareness; cognitive science aspects of the recent advances in cyber situation awareness

Motivation for the Book This book seeks to establish the state of the art in the cyber situational awareness area and to set the course for future research. A multidisciplinary group of leading researchers from cyber security, cognitive science, and decision science areas elab orate on the fundamental challenges facing the research community and identify promising solution paths. Today, when a security incident occurs, the top three questions security admin istrators would ask are in essence: What has happened? Why did it happen? What should I do? Answers to the ?rst two questions form the core of Cyber Situational Awareness. Whether the last question can be satisfactorily answered is greatly de pendent upon the cyber situational awareness capability of an enterprise. A variety of computer and network security research topics (especially some sys tems security topics) belong to or touch the scope of Cyber Situational Awareness. However, the Cyber Situational Awareness capability of an enterprise is still very limited for several reasons: • Inaccurate and incomplete vulnerability analysis, intrusion detection, and foren sics. • Lack of capability to monitor certain microscopic system/attack behavior. • Limited capability to transform/fuse/distill information into cyber intelligence. • Limited capability to handle uncertainty. • Existing system designs are not very “friendly” to Cyber Situational Awareness.

If you’re involved in cybersecurity as a software developer, forensic investigator, or network administrator, this practical guide shows you how to apply the scientific method when assessing techniques for protecting your information systems. You’ll learn how to conduct scientific experiments on everyday tools and procedures, whether you’re evaluating corporate security systems, testing your own security product, or looking for bugs in a mobile game. Once author Josiah Dykstra gets you up to speed on the scientific method, he helps you focus on standalone, domain-specific topics, such as cryptography, malware analysis, and system security engineering. The latter chapters include practical case studies that demonstrate how to use available tools to conduct domain-specific scientific experiments. Learn the steps necessary to conduct scientific experiments in cybersecurity Explore fuzzing to test how your software handles various inputs Measure the performance of the Snort intrusion detection system Locate malicious “needles in a haystack” in your network and IT environment Evaluate cryptography design and application in IoT products Conduct an experiment to identify relationships between similar malware binaries Understand system-level security requirements for enterprise networks and web services