Department of Energy Cyber Security Incidents

Despite significant interest in cybersecurity, data on cyber security incidents remains scarce. On April 16, 2015, the US Department of Energy released data on 1,131 cybersecurity incidents through a Freedom of Information Act Request. While only containing the date, location, and type of incident, several interesting insights can be kneaded from the data. In this paper, we analyze the DOE security incident data and perform a statistical analysis on the rate of incidents. We find that the rate of cybersecurity incidents is decreasing over time and that incidents can be modeled stochastically. We believe that this is further evidence that cyber risk can be accurately evaluated with data-driven models.