Modelling cyber-attacks: a survey study

Abstract

Computer networks play an important role in many areas of life, which makes them attractive targets for hackers looking to steal sensitive data and cause critical damage. Every day the situation is getting worse; there has been an increase in the number of attacks and their complexity. 1,2 Cyber-attacks are varied and sophisticated, making security analysis more complex. And so research is currently focusing on cyberthreat analysis to learn an attacker's behavioral model and predict the model of attack for any network. 3 To defeat cyber-attacks it's important to understand their characteristics and how they come about. It's also important to comprehend the attackers’ objectives. Understanding the characteristics of attacks is paramount in creating a good security strategy, so attack modelling is important in gaining a perspective on how attacks can be stopped in a co-ordinated manner. Yassine Ayrour, Amine Raji and Mahmoud Nassar provide a comparative study of the state of the art in attack modelling techniques and show how these approaches can help identify attack vectors before they are used.