Visualization as an aid for assessing the mission impact of information security breaches

One of the objectives of the DARPA Phase 2 SBIR project entitled "Visual Representation of Cyber Defense Situational Awareness" was to prototype 3-D visual representations of mission impact of information security events. Secure Decisions, a Division of Applied Visions Inc., prototyped several mission impact visual displays, and incorporated the most promising ones into a visualization software architecture called SecureScope(TM) that can be deployed in an operational setting. The mission impact visualization system can interface to any common relational database that links IA events to the cyber assets (e.g. workstations, data files) on which those events occur, and includes relationships about the organization's mission-critical tasks that depend on those assets. It visually represents "bottom-up" mission impact analyses showing the mission effect of a specific breach on a, specific asset, as well as, "top down" analyses showing which cyber assets must be secured for supporting the achievement of certain mission-critical tasks.