Rejoinder: The Emerging Role of Data Science in Cybersecurity

We thank the discussants for their perspectives on our presentation (Hero et al., 2023) of emerging challenges in cybersecurity and the role of data science in addressing these challenges.We enjoyed reading the discussants' comments, as they amplify and reinforce our principal point: that statistical methods of data science will have an increasingly important impact on cybersecurity solutions.Each of the discussants' narratives stands on its own and we are in agreement with most of their points.The comments in the contribution of discussants Sanna Passino et al. ( 2023) are highly relevant, both from a foundations standpoint and from an applications perspective.We thank them for their remarks on challenges, data structures, and future directions in statistical cybersecurity.The proposal by Sanna Passino et al. ( 2023) to segment multimodal data into a few well-defined data structures and design fusion approaches for anomaly analysis over multiclass data is timely and could potentially enable a systematic approach to cybersecurity analysis of complex systems.We heartily agree that data structures, data fusion, and streaming methods will be important components to developing domain-specific data-driven cybersecurity solutions.Concerning data structures, Sanna Passino et al. ( 2023) give three common examples: graphs, point processes, and textual data.We note that data can either come directly in these forms or, more often, they are derived from more complex data types, such as images and video; for example, respectively as spatial correspondence graphs, event-marking point processes, or text captions.In the latter case, it may be beneficial to consider these data types as unstructured and in context, rather than solely considering the extracted data structures.Below we add to the discussant's comments on the importance of each of the three data structures to cybersecurity.