Modeling the Impact of Cyber Attacks

In this chapter, we continue exploring how resilient is a network to a failure propagating through it; however, now we also include an explicit treatment of specific causes of failure – malicious activities of the cyber attacker. This chapter considers cyber attacks and the ability to counteract their implementation as the key factors determining the resilience of computer networks and systems. Indeed, cyber attacks are the most important among destabilizing forces impacting a network. Moreover, the term cyber resilience can be interpreted as the stability of computer networks or systems operating under impact of cyber attacks. The approach in this chapter involves the construction of analytical models to implement the most well-known types of attacks. The result of the modeling is the distribution function of time and average time of implementation of cyber attacks. These estimates are then used to find the indicators of cyber resilience. To construct analytical models of cyber attacks, this chapter introduces an approach based on the stochastic networks conversion, which works well for modeling multi-stage stochastic processes of different natures.