A Probabilistic Approach to Estimate the Damage Propagation of Cyber Attacks

With rapid development in the Internet technology, business management in an organization becomes dependent on network dependency and cohesiveness in a critical information and communications infrastructure. However, the occurrence of cyber attacks has increased, targeted against vulnerable resources in information systems. Hence, in order to protect private information and computer resources, risk analysis and damage propagation need to be studied. However, the existing models present mechanisms for risk management, and these models can only be applied to specified threats such as a virus or a worm. Therefore, a probabilistic model for damage propagation based on Markov process is proposed, which can be applied to diverse threats in information systems. The proposed model enables us to predict the occurrence probability and occurrence frequency of each threat in the information systems.