Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics in Support of Cyber Defense

Abstract

Cybersecurity analysts rely on vast volumes of security event data to predict, identify, characterize, and deal with security threats. These analysts must understand and make sense of these huge datasets in order to discover patterns which lead to intelligent decision making and advance warnings of possible threats, and this ability requires automation. Big data analytics and artificial intelligence can improve cyber defense. Big data analytics methods are applied to large data sets that contain different data types. The purpose is to detect patterns, correlations, trends, and other useful information. Artificial intelligence provides algorithms that can reason or learn and improve their behavior, and includes semantic technologies. A large number of automated systems are currently based on syntactic rules which are generally not sophisticated enough to deal with the level of complexity in this domain. An overview of artificial intelligence and big data technologies in cyber defense is provided, and important areas for future research are identified and discussed.