Faced with a looming shortage of tech talent, the tech industry has often partnered with academia to “lock in” tomorrow’s professionals, ensure students are equipped, and cultivate talent to address emerging cyber threats. In this spirit, Guidance Software has funded a program at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to support data security research using advanced anomaly science.
The discoveries will be published and used to enhance data breach detection and incident response capabilities.
The joint program will be run from Caltech's new laboratory, the Discovery Data-Driven Center, in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The Center was established to advance data-intensive, computationally enabled science and technology.
The research will be led by Principal Scientist Julian Bynn and Emeritus Professor Mani Chandy, who have developed algorithms and processes for detecting anomalous patterns in datasets used in critical areas such as earthquake prediction and now in detecting advanced malware and its polymorphic variants.
The theory is that early and effective breach detection of modern threats requires a scientific approach based on machine learning and statistical models. The most common ways to address data security issues are through the use of signatures, blacklists or shared threat intelligence. These traditional approaches leave organizations vulnerable to unknown or zero-day malware, which can only be found by focusing on identifying abnormal or atypical behaviors that may indicate unauthorized access to sensitive data.
