abstract: Reasoning about the activities of cyber threat actors is critical to defend against cyber
attacks. However, this task is difficult for a variety of reasons. In simple terms, it is difficult
to determine who the attacker is, what the desired goals are of the attacker, and how they will
carry out their attacks. These three questions essentially entail understanding the attacker’s
use of deception, the capabilities available, and the intent of launching the attack. These
three issues are highly inter-related. If an adversary can hide their intent, they can better
deceive a defender. If an adversary’s capabilities are not well understood, then determining
what their goals are becomes difficult as the defender is uncertain if they have the necessary
tools to accomplish them. However, the understanding of these aspects are also mutually
supportive. If we have a clear picture of capabilities, intent can better be deciphered. If we
understand intent and capabilities, a defender may be able to see through deception schemes.
In this dissertation, I present three pieces of work to tackle these questions to obtain
a better understanding of cyber threats. First, we introduce a new reasoning framework
to address deception. We evaluate the framework by building a dataset from DEFCON
capture-the-flag exercise to identify the person or group responsible for a cyber attack.
We demonstrate that the framework not only handles cases of deception but also provides
transparent decision making in identifying the threat actor. The second task uses a cognitive
learning model to determine the intent – goals of the threat actor on the target system.
The third task looks at understanding the capabilities of threat actors to target systems by
identifying at-risk systems from hacker discussions on darkweb websites. To achieve this
task we gather discussions from more than 300 darkweb websites relating to malicious
hacking. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Engineering 2018
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:asu.edu/item:50463 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Contributors | Nunes, Eric (Author), Shakarian, Paulo (Advisor), Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member), Baral, Chitta (Committee member), Cooke, Nancy (Committee member), Arizona State University (Publisher) |
| Source Sets | Arizona State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Dissertation |
| Format | 177 pages |
| Rights | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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