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Statistical Challenges in Cyber Security

Professor Mark Briers - Turing Programme Director for Defence & Security

Open to all University of Exeter Staff and Students - tea, coffee and networking available after the seminar.


Event details

Abstract

With the realisation that Cyber attack presents a significant risk to an organisation's reputation, efficiency, and profitability, there has been an increase in the instrumentation of networks; from collecting netflow data at routers, to host-based agents collecting detailed process information. To spot the potential threats within a Cyber environment, a large community of researchers have produced many exciting innovations, aligned with such data. Much of this research has been focused around "data driven" techniques, and does not often fuse data from multiple sources. Moreover, incorporation of threat actors' behaviours and motivations (as specified by Cyber security experts) is often non-existent. In this talk, I will present an overview of the statistical challenges facing the Cyber domain, and demonstrate the use of two-filter smoothing within a state-space modelling context for the characterisation of user behaviour within a point-process model.

Mark Briers is Programme Director for The Alan Turing Institute's Defence and Security partnership and Professor of Cyber Security and AI at Cranfield University. Prior to joining Turing, Mark worked in the defence and security sector for over 16 years, directing research programmes in the area of statistical data analysis, and leading large teams to drive impactful research outputs. He completed his PhD in 2007 at Cambridge University where he developed Sequential Monte Carlo based techniques for state-space filtering and smoothing.
He is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London, where he teaches methodological techniques for use in a Big Data environment and conducts research into statistical methods for cyber security, and he is a Council Member at the Royal Statistical Society. He is an Industrial Fellow alumnus of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. Mark is a co-investigator on the EPSRC funded programme grant Computational Statistical Inference for Engineering and Security.

Location:

LSI Seminar Room A