Company
Date Published
Author
Steven Noel
Word count
2467
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

MITRE Corporation is a federally-funded, non-profit company that manages seven national research and development laboratories to address issues of cybersecurity. Analysts need to track large amounts of detailed information to be successful in cybersecurity, including network and endpoint vulnerabilities, firewall configurations, and intrusion detection events. To determine the appropriate response to an alert, analysts must answer questions such as whether a threat is legitimate, what it means if an alert is true, and whether it's related to a system that needs protection. A graph model can help analyze and relate these pieces of information. MITRE has built a tool called Cauldron to analyze data in a way that prevents cyber attacks, which takes into account network segmentation, firewalls, and vulnerabilities. However, this tool was expensive to develop and required custom code. To address this, MITRE developed CyGraph, a small research project that uses Neo4j graph databases to build a generic data-driven architecture for analyzing cybersecurity threats. This allows for flexibility in extending the data model and morphing the analytics based on new information. Graph visualization is also an important aspect of this approach, as it enables analysts to explore and understand complex relationships between different pieces of information. CyGraph can be used to analyze multiple threat alerts, determine attack response, and provide a domain-specific language for automating queries. The technology has been applied in various real-world scenarios, including customer dependency graphs, packet capture data analysis, and process modeling and simulation.