Estimating risk boundaries for persistent and stealthy cyber-attacks

Awan, Malik Shahzad, Burnap, Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0396-633X and Rana, Omer Farooq ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3597-2646 2015. Estimating risk boundaries for persistent and stealthy cyber-attacks. Presented at: 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Denver Colorado, USA, 12-16 October 2015. SafeConfig '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Automated Decision Making for Active Cyber Defense. ACM, pp. 15-20. 10.1145/2809826.2809830

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Abstract

Increasingly mature, stealthy and dynamic techniques and attack vectors used by cyber criminals have made network infrastructure more vulnerable to security breaches. Moreover, cyber-attacks involving advanced evasion techniques often bypass security controls, and even if detected at a later time could still remain in the system for a long time without any monitorable trace. Such types of cyber-attacks are costing billions of dollars to the organizations across the globe. This dynamic and complex threat landscape demands a network administrator to understand the nature, patterns and risks of cyber-attacks targeting the network infrastructure so that appropriate measures could be introduced. In this paper we propose: (i) a framework to formally characterize the features of such advanced persistent threats, (ii) propose a security metric to calculate risk based on characteristics of such threats, and (iii) estimate risk boundaries for persistent and stealthy cyber-attacks. We validate and analyze the application of our proposed risk framework using real-world traffic logs acquired from an Intrusion Detection/Prevention System.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Publisher:	ACM
ISBN:	9781450338219
Funders:	EPSRC
Last Modified:	10 Sep 2025 21:53
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/79467

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