A cognitive system and method for predicting and detecting security breaches is provided which yields cognitive inputs to a security management interface accessible by a human operator. The system utilizes symbolic cognitive architectures and inference processing algebras allowing the system to respond to open, incomplete, and/or unknown problem domains, offering flexibility in the case of unexpected changes in the security environment. The system is also capable of intelligently, and in real-time, adapting security peripheral configurations to further probe and analyze the real-time security environment, provided real-time data that can be processed with symbolic cognitive architectures and inference process algebras enabling the identification of new and emerging threat profiles leading to the prediction and detection of security breaches.