Virginia Tech’s National Security Institute hosted the final workshop in a three-part series to evaluate how metadata capture within network perimeters can provide additional information to effectively detect, protect and secure federal information.

Recent cyber events and direction from the Executive Branch call for a rethinking of how the Federal Government, in partnership with the private sector, must improve efforts to identify, deter, protect against, detect, and respond to malicious cyber campaigns. In response to this call, Virginia Tech’s National Security Institute hosted a series of three workshops between June 2022 and August 2023 to evaluate how metadata about network traffic moving across and within federal civilian agencies could be leveraged more effectively to detect, protect and respond to cyber threats and to better secure federal information. Specifically, the workshops explored the concept of generating metadata about network traffic traversing government networks to enhance the government’s ability to rapidly detect and respond to cyber threats.

Workshop 3 provided a more specific definition of metadata and refined what data should be generated and how that data could be used to enhance federal civilian agency cybersecurity in a pilot.

Read the full report below.

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Metadata Workshop Report - Defining the Pilot.pdf
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Learn more about the first and second workshops in the series.