A Survey of Cyber Security Approaches for Attack Detection, Prediction, and Prevention

The expanding threat landscape has come with a plethora of consequences for most organizations and individuals. This is witnessed in the high volume of cyber-attacks prevalent in the cyberspace. Though several approaches have been proposed and deployed in recent times, most of them are only theoretical masterpieces while others remain computationally infeasible due to the computational requirements for implementing them. Where implementation is possible, the issue of computational complexity becomes a significant overhead in which case a large amount of computing resources such as CPU cycle, memory, network bandwidth and data structures are consumed culminating in tedious, time consuming, and error prone processes. Similarly, most of these techniques are basically reactive and as such can only be triggered when an incident is reported while most depend on the administrator to apply the necessary mitigation processes after an attack has occurred. To this effect, this paper presents a survey of cyber security approaches that have been proposed in the Literature. The paper also reviews the methodologies, strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, and finally identifies areas where further research could focus.