Conference proceeding
Using Semantic-Web Technologies for Situation Assessments of Ethical Hacking High-Value Targets
European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security
01 Jun 2021
Abstract
Ethical hacking consists of scanning for targets, evaluating the targets, gaining access, maintaining access, and clearing tracks. The evaluation of targets represents a complex task due to the number of IP addresses, domain names, open ports, vulnerabilities, and exploits that must be examined. Ethical hackers synthesize data from various hacking tools to determine targets that are of high value and that are highly susceptible to cyber-attacks. These tasks represent situation assessment tasks. Previous research considers situation assessment tasks to be tasks that involve viewing an initial set of information about a problem and subsequently piecing together more information to solve the problem. Our research used semantic-web technologies, including ontologies, natural language processing (NLP), and semantic queries, to automate the situation assessment tasks conducted by ethical hackers when evaluating targets. More specifically, our research focused on automatically identifying education organizations that use industrial control system protocols which in turn have highly exploitable vulnerabilities and known exploits. We used semantic-web technologies to reduce an initial dataset of 126,636 potential targets to 155 distinct targets with these characteristics. Our research adds to previous research on situation assessment by showing how semantic-web technologies can be used to reduce the complexity of situation assessment tasks.
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Details
- Title
- Using Semantic-Web Technologies for Situation Assessments of Ethical Hacking High-Value Targets
- Creators
- Sanjana SureshRachel FisherRadha PatoleAndrew ZeyherThomas Heverin
- Publication Details
- European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security
- Conference
- European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security
- Publisher
- Academic Conferences International Limited
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Information Science (Informatics); College of Computing and Informatics
- Other Identifier
- 991020531946104721