CAUSE: Predictive Software to Counter Cyber Attacks

The intelligence community is holding a contest to design software that combs open source data to predict cyber attacks before they occur. 
Imagine if IBM’s Watson — the “Jeopardy!” champion supercomputer — could answer not only trivia questions and forecast the weather, but also predict data breaches days before they occur. That is the ambitious, long-term goal of a contest being held by the US intelligence community. 
Academics and industry scientists are teaming up to build software that can analyze publicly available data and a specific organization’s network activity to find patterns suggesting the likelihood of an imminent hack.
The dream of the future: A White House supercomputer spitting out forecasts on the probability that, say, China will try to intercept situation room video that day, or that Russia will eavesdrop on Secretary of State John Kerry’s phone conversations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. 
IBM has even expressed interest in the “Cyber-attack Automated Unconventional Sensor Environment,” or CAUSE, project. Big Blue officials presented a basic approach at a Jan. 21 proposers’ day.
CAUSE is the brainchild of the Office for Anticipating Surprise under the director of national intelligence. Current plans call for a four-year race to develop a totally new way of detecting cyber incidents — hours to weeks earlier than intrusion-detection systems, according to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. 
The project’s cyber-psychic bots will estimate when an intruder might attempt to break into a system or install malicious code. Forecasts also will report when a hacker might flood a network with bogus traffic that freezes operations – a so-called Denial-of-Service attack.
Such computer-driven predictions have worked for anticipating the spread of Ebola, other disease outbreaks and political uprisings. But few researchers have used such technology for cyberattack forecasts.
About 150 would-be participants from the private sector and academia showed up for the January informational workshop. Rahmer was tight-lipped about the size of the prize pot, which will be announced later this year. Teams will have to meet various minigoals to pass on to the next round of competition, such as picking data feeds, creating probability formulas and forecasting cyberattacks across multiple organizations. 
It’s not an exact science. There will be false alarms. And the human brain must provide some support after the machines do their thing.
Clues might be found on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, as well as online discussions, news feeds, Web searches and many other online platforms. Unconventional sources tapped could include black market storefronts that peddle malware and hacker group-behavior models. AI will do all this work, not people. Machines will try to infer motivations and intentions. Then mathematical formulas, or algorithms, will parse these streams of data to generate likely hits. 
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/02/spy-research-agency-building-machine-predict-cyber-attacks/105951/