A model to facilitate discussions about cyber attacks

Book section

The evolution of the Internet and digital systems is making it increasingly difficult to understand cyber attacks. Politicians, ethicists, lawyers, business owners and other stakeholders are all affected by them, yet many lack necessary technical background to make correct decisions in dealing with them. Conversely, cyber-security analysts have a better understanding about the technical aspects of cyber attacks, but many do not understand the repercussions of decisions made from their perspective alone. Both contextual (e.g. societal, political, legal, financial, reputational aspects etc.) as well as technical considerations must be taken into account in making decisions that relate to a cyber attack. A plethora of cyber-attack models exist today that aid (to some degree) understanding of attacks. Most of these however focus on delivering insight from a single perspective: technical detail or understanding of human-centric factors. These approaches do not outline how a discussion among expert-domain people of different backgrounds should be conducted to establish a basic situational awareness understanding, from which to make collective decisions. In this chapter, we present our efforts towards establishing such a model to enable a collective approach in discussing cyber attacks. In this paper, we propose a first version, but believe extensions should be made. We also acknowledge that testing and assessment in real environments is necessary.

Authors: Happa, J; Fairclough, G

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer, Cham
• Host title: Ethics and Policies for Cyber Operations
• Volume: 124
• Pages: 169-185
• Series: Philosophical Studies Series
• Publication date: 2016-12-02
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45300-2_10
• ISBN: 9783319452999