Chapter 29 Cognitive Computing and Multiscale Analysis for Cyber Security Sana Siddiqui, Muhammad Salman Khan, and Ken Ferens 29.1 Cyber-Threat Landscape The pervasive role and contribution of the Internet in our daily lives have made us more susceptible to cyber-attacks. From malware, web based attacks, botnets, phishing to ransomware, and cyber-espionage, the field of cyber-threats is multi- faceted. In 2015 alone, a zero-day vulnerability was found every week on average and nine breaches with over 10 million records per breach were reported. Also, more than one million users became the target of web attacks daily while in general, a large organization observed at least 3.6 successful average attacks; and the deadly ransomware increased by 35% from the previous year [1]. Moreover, malware which has consecutively topped the list of cyber-threats within past few years has observed an increase of one million samples per day [2]. Also, in 2016 alone, average 58 thousand new malicious URLs were found every day [2] which are major source of web based attacks. Further, an extreme volumetric surge in denial of service (DoS) attacks was observed reaching bandwidths of 100 Gbps [2]. Exploit kits (e.g., rootkits) based malicious activities have increased by almost 67% [2]. Overall, there was a reported increase of 64% in security related incidents [3] with varying motives including but not limited to financial gain, physical harm, intellectual property theft, and political damage. It is worth-noting that healthcare was the most frequently targeted industry in addition to government, financial services, educational organization, and manufacturing industries [3, 4]. Also, the biggest risks for any organization remain the insider-threat which was the source of S. Siddiqui () • M.S. Khan • K. Ferens Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada e-mail: siddiqu5@myumanitoba.ca; muhammadsalman.khan@umanitoba.ca; ken.ferens@umanitoba.ca © Springer International Publishing AG 2018 K. Daimi (ed.), Computer and Network Security Essentials, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58424-9_29 507