Data-Intensive Visual Analysis for Cyber Security

Abstract

Protecting communications networks against attacks where the aim is to steal information, disrupt order, or harm critical infrastructure can require the collection and analysis of staggering amounts of data. The ability to detect and respond to threats quickly is a paramount concern across sectors, and especially for critical government, utility and financial networks. Yet detecting emerging or incipient threats in immense volumes of network traffic requires new computational and analytic approaches. Network security increasingly requires cooperation between human analysts able to spot suspicious events through means such as data visualization and automated systems that process streaming network data in near real-time to triage events so that human analysts are best able to focus their work.