Cybersecurity

Evading Malware Classifiers via Monte Carlo Mutant Feature Discovery

The use of Machine Learning has become a significant part of malware detection efforts due to the influx of new malware, an ever changing threat landscape, and the ability of Machine Learning methods to discover meaningful distinctions between …

Random Forest of Tensors (RFoT)

Machine learning has become an invaluable tool in the fight against malware. Traditional supervised and unsupervised methods are not designed to capture the multi-dimensional details that are often present in cyber data. In contrast, tensor …

Multi-Dimensional Anomalous Entity Detection via Poisson Tensor Factorization

As the attack surfaces of large enterprise networks grow, anomaly detection systems based on statistical user behavior analysis play a crucial role in identifying malicious activities. Previous work has shown that link prediction algorithms based on …

Anomalous Event Detection using Non-Negative Poisson Tensor Factorization

Network intrusion detection systems that are based on statistical User Behaviour Analytics play a fundamental role in the identification of anomalous agents such as malicious insiders, misused accounts, and users with compromised credentials. To this extent, there have been significant results in detecting anomalies from learned user behavior models via non-negative Poisson matrix factorization. We expand upon previous work in this project by exploiting the higher dimensional and sparse problems created by the user authentication data. An integrated multidimensional anomaly scoring method based on tensors and Poisson recommender systems is proposed. In our experiments, we build a higher-order model that can detect the accounts compromised by red-team during penetration testing activities at a large organization.

Project-based learning continues to inspire cybersecurity students: the 2018--2019 SFS research studies at UMBC

Citation: Enis Golaszewski, Alan T. Sherman, Linda Oliva, Peter A. H. Peterson, Michael R. Bailey, Scott Bohon, Cyrus Bonyadi, Casey Borror, Ryan Coleman, Johannah Flenner, Elias Enamorado, Maksim E. Eren, Mohammad Khan, Emmanuel Larbi, Kyle Marshall, William Morgan, Lauren Mundy, Gabriel Onana, Selma Gomez Orr, Lauren Parker, Caleb Pinkney, Mykah Rather, Jimmy Rodriguez, Bryan Solis, Wubnyonga Tete, Tsigereda B.