Dottorato in INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA

Titolo della tesi: Cyber Threats Management using Visual Analytics

Cybercrime has rapidly developed over the past years, and cyber threats are expected to present significant risks for the future. The massive presence of information communication technologies in our personal and working lives pushes cybersecurity to become a matter of global interest. Although numerous advancements to improve cyber defense have been proposed during the last years, practical applications of automatic decision-making solutions are limited to very few situations, while most of the secure processes still rely on a human in the loop. To tackle these challenges, Visual Analytics (VA) techniques have historically been applied to the cybersecurity domain, gaining increasing interest from the research community. Although VA solutions have proven their effectiveness in the cybersecurity domain, their application to complex infrastructures is often challenging, and existing tools can still present several gaps and limitations. To this aim, this thesis has presented four years of research activities aiming at supporting three main requirements concerning the cybersecurity domain: R1) support cybersecurity operators in vulnerability detection activities, R2) support cybersecurity operators in vulnerability assessment activities, and R3) support cybersecurity operators in the proactive analysis of the exposure to cyber attacks and the definition of mitigation strategies over their IT systems. During the research activities that have been conducted to address the research objectives on the cybersecurity domain, we have faced out the challenging problem of providing useful solutions to visualize and analyze multidimensional data; problem that has opened collateral research activities. Consequently, we have additionally identified two more research objectives that have addressed the collateral problem of supporting multidimensional data analysis, contributing to the pure Visual Analytics discipline.