Toward Geographical Visualizations for Hierarchical Security Data

The increasing number of cyber incidents that critical infrastructures are experimenting is pushing for developing situation awareness systems that exploits geographical data about the network under control. This poster describes the Visual Analytics solution that is under development in the European project PANOPTESEC [6] for monitoring the ACEA (an Italian organization that provides power to millions of end users) complex hierarchical structure of the geographical network and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems network. The proposed solution allows for monitoring a complex geographical network through ad-hoc visualizations, dealing with the cardinality of the network nodes, the different hierarchical layers that exist at both topological and geographical levels, and the need of combining quick awareness overviews together with local (geographical and topological) views, allowing for understanding the contribution of single nodes to the overall situation. In spite of the locality of the ACEA network, such issues are quite general and the results presented in the poster can be exploited in other geographical layered computer networks. Summarizing, the key novel features of the proposed solution are: (1)the seamlessly integration of the geographical and topological layers, (2) the clear relationship between the analysis focus(es) and the context, both at geographical and topological levels and (3) the cyber incident risk representation at different scales, with an automatic cluster/voronoi based optimization of the node representation.