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Computing the system signature is an attractive but challenging problem in system reliability. In this article, we propose a novel algorithm to compute the signature of a system with exchangeable c...

Modeling cybersecurity risks is an important, yet challenging, problem. In this paper, we initiate the study of modeling multivariate cybersecurity risks. We develop the first statistical a...

Internet-based computer information systems play critical roles in many aspects of modern society. However, these systems are constantly under cyber attacks that can cause catastrophic consequences. To defend these systems effectively, it is necessary to measure and predict the effectiveness of cyber defense mechanisms. In this article, we investigate how to measure and predict the effectiveness of an important cyber defense mechanism that is known as early-warning. This turns out to be a challenging problem because we must accommodate the dependence among certain four-dimensional time series. In the course of using a dataset to demonstrate the prediction methodology, we discovered a new nonexchangeable and rotationally symmetric dependence structure, which may be of independent value. We propose a new vine copula model to accommodate the newly discovered dependence structure, and show that the new model can predict the effectiveness of early-warning more accurately than the others. We also discus...

Cyber attacks have become a problem that is threatening the economy, human privacy, and even national security. Before we can adequately address the problem, we need to have a crystal clear understanding about cyber attacks from various perspectives. This is a challenge because the Internet is a large-scale complex system with humans in the loop. In this paper, we investigate a particular perspective of the problem, namely the extreme value phenomenon that is exhibited by cyber attack rates, which are the numbers of attacks against a system of interest per time unit. It is important to explore this perspective because understanding the statistical properties of extreme cyber attack rates will pave the way for cost-effective, if not optimal, allocation of resources in real-life cyber defense operations. Specifically, we propose modeling and predicting extreme cyber attack rates via marked point processes, while using the Value-at-Risk as a natural measure of intense cyber attacks. The point process...