Approaches to Prediction of Cyber Events: Report of the 2017 Specialist Meeting by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Research Group IST-145-RTG

Traditional approaches for gaining cyber domain situational awareness seldom consider factors associated with the adversary’s capabilities and behaviors. The 2017 NATO Specialist Meeting, IST-145, on Predictive Analytics and Analysis in the Cyber Domain intends to show that if these factors are taken into consideration, multiple and cooperative analytic approaches can predict exploitation of known vulnerabilities even if the attack pattern is previously unknown. Furthermore, we intend to show that such predictions provide meaningful temporal mission impact alerts to operators and commanders, and can move cyber defense from reactive to proactive. This will help maintain NATO and national security.