Systematically Understanding the Cyber Attack Business

Abstract

Cyber attacks are increasingly menacing businesses. Based on the literature review and publicly available reports, this article conducts an extensive and consistent survey of the services used by the cybercrime business, organized using the value chain perspective, to understand cyber attack in a systematic way. Understanding the specialization, commercialization, and cooperation for cyber attacks helps us to identify 24 key value-added activities and their relations. These can be offered “as a service” for use in a cyber attack. This framework helps to understand the cybercriminal service ecosystem and hacking innovations. Finally, a few examples are provided showing how this framework can help to build a more cyber immune system, like targeting cybercrime control-points and assigning defense responsibilities to encourage collaboration.