An Early Warning System for New Cyberattacks

Kick off the new year with an awesome talk! Our January meeting will focus on data science approaches in cybersecurity with speaker Vasudha Shivamoggi from Rapid7.

Title:
An Early Warning System for New Cyberattacks

Abstract:
Cyberattacks can expose sensitive data and immobilize critical processes, making it important for responders to react as quickly as possible. Identifying new attacks in real time, however, is difficult. The challenge is to pick up on small signals while avoiding a flood of false positives. In this talk, we'll describe a machine learning based approach to identifying new attacks. We use a combination of time series and clustering methods to establish a baseline of behavior, and then flag anomalies appearing against these expected baseline. The result is a filtering tool that reduces the enormous volume of internet traffic to a manageable set of anomalous events for an expert to review.

Speaker Bio:
Vasudha is a Senior Data Scientist at Rapid7, a cybersecurity company headquartered in Boston. She develops predictive models to better understand the nature of security threats and vulnerabilities, and works on automated ways to identify cyber attacks. Prior to this, Vasudha worked in retail analytics and quantum computing research. She has a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley and SB in physics from MIT.

Agenda:
6:00pm: Meet and greet. Talk about anomaly detection!
6:30pm: Talk by Vasudha Shivamoggi + Q&A
7:30pm: Announcements
8:00pm: End of the event

Sponsors:
Light refreshments will be provided by MassMutual.