Novel graph method detects cyber-attack patterns in complex computing networks
As the perils of cyber security breaches continue to plague industries, governments, and citizens throughout the world, the need to detect these infiltrating events, as well as identify their attack patterns, in complex computing networks as they emerge in real time remains a paramount concern and growing challenge. In their work involving streaming graphs, scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Washington State University, devised a novel framework called StreamWorks that categorizes cyber attacks as graph patterns, which then can be examined using a continuous search (query) on a single, large streaming dynamic graph. "Continuous Query" focuses on finding matches for queries in a data stream as soon as they happen, which is in contrast to ad hoc querying supported by databases such as MySQL or Neo4J that aim to efficiently query a large, non-changing data set.