Dr. Hsinchun Chen featured in National Science Foundation news

If you're a hacker, you gather as much data as you can on your targets, in search of something valuable.

If you're researcher Hsinchun Chen, you gather as much data as you can on the hackers.

Chen, a professor of management information systems at the University of Arizona, works in a little-explored, but hugely important area of cybersecurity: Exploring the motivations of hackers and other cyberattackers, and trying to predict how they might act, based on their behaviors.

With support from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate and the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering under the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, Chen and his collaborators have generated findings that shed light on how hacker communities interact and share information--and even created actionable intelligence for criminal investigations by federal agencies.

But the research's goal is even more ambitious. Chen wants to develop models that might be able to take information on how hackers behave and use it to predict their next targets, as well as their methods for attack.

"The most important part isn't looking back and saying 'what have they done?'" Chen says. "It's looking forward and saying 'What are the emerging threats?' We're really trying to understand the intent of the people planning attacks. Instead of looking at the bullets, you're looking at the shooters."

See more on the NSF News website  via the URL link provided below.

National Science Foundation, News, October 8, 2015

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=136513&org=NSF&from=news