Case Study: MITRE achieves scalable, comprehensive cybersecurity situational awareness with Neo4j

Graph Technology Powers Cybersecurity Situational Awareness That’s More Scalable, Flexible & Comprehensive

MITRE, a federally funded not‑for‑profit that operates national R&D labs, faced an influx of cybersecurity telemetry—alerts, logs and events—without visibility into the relationships between those data points. Their initial prototype, Cauldron, lacked a database backend and couldn’t scale to support the ad hoc queries, analytics and visualizations needed to map vulnerabilities and assess mission readiness.

Using the Neo4j graph database, MITRE developed CyGraph, a property‑graph tool that consolidates disparate data and relationships into a continuously evolving knowledge base. CyGraph correlates alerts to vulnerability paths, prioritizes mission‑critical exposures, supports post‑attack forensics and visualization, and—by leveraging existing tools and standards (CVE, CVSS, CWE, etc.)—gives government agencies a more scalable, flexible and comprehensive situational‑awareness capability.

MITRE

Steven Noel

Principal Cybersecurity Engineer