Michael Ippolito
CUNY DATA621
Blog #4

A Poisson Model to Forecast the Increasing Number of Computer Vulnerabilities

Introduction

As anyone familiar with the field of cybersecurity will tell you, it’s hard to keep up with the hackers. If your organization has data worth exploiting, someone will try to find a way to exploit it. Even if you do all the things you’re supposed to do (e.g. patch your systems, scan for vulnerabilities, perform penetration testing, train your users not to click suspicious links), someone will always try to develop a new way to break in. And with the growing number of applications and devices running those applications, the number of ways to exploit them is growing at an increasing rate.

As a cybersecurity professional, I was interested in trying to gauge that rate in quantitative terms. This is helpful for a number of reasons, not least of which is how to evaluate the number of staff hours needed to assess the growing number of vulnerabilities. To that end, I built a model to analyze the trend in the number of vulnerabilities over time, as well as to predict the number of vulnerabilities we might see in the coming years.

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