A model for predicting the likelihood of successful exploitation

Abstract

This paper presents a model that estimates the likelihood that a detected vulnerability can be exploited. The data used to produce the model was obtained by carrying out an experiment that involved exploit attempts against 1179 different machines within a cyber range. Three machine learning algorithms were tested: support vector machines, random forests and neural networks. The best results were provided by a random forest model. This model has a mean cross-validation accuracy of 98.2% and an F1 score of 0.73.