The Notion of Relevance in Cybersecurity: A Categorization of Security Tools and Deduction of Relevance Notions

Abstract

Proper cybersecurity requires timely information to defend the IT infrastructure. In a dynamic field like cybersecurity, gathering up-to-date information is usually a manual, time-consuming, and exhaustive task. Automatic and usable approaches are supposed to be a solution to this problem, but for this, they require a notion of information relevance to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information. First, on the basis of a literature review, this paper proposes a novel cybersecurity tool categorization based on corresponding tool types with their respective definitions and core features. Second, it elaborates information used in each category and deduces notions of relevance. Third, it outlines how these findings informed the design of a security dashboard to guide computer emergency response team staff in identifying current threats in open source intelligence sources while mitigating information overload.