On the Road to Holistic Decision Making in Adaptive Security

Cybersecurity threats, such as Internet worms (tinyurl.com/lg2wghw), can spread too quickly for humans to respond and pose a genuine risk to users and systems. In March 2013, a computer scam fooled some Canadian Internet users by picking up their location and making it appear as though the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had frozen their screens; pop-ups demanded that users must pay a $100 fine to have their computer unlocked (CBC, 2013; tinyurl.com/lhuwq82). In the same month, a computer virus paralyzed computer networks of broadcasters and banks in a network attack in South Korea (BBC, 2013; tinyurl.com/cgustwk). The economic and national security consequences of these types of attacks are severe. The official website of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS; tinyurl.com/kttv9qo) indicates that the Secret Services Cyber Intelligence Section has directly contributed to the arrest of transnational cybercriminals who were responsible for the theft of hundreds of millions of credit card numbers and the loss of approximately $600 million to financial and retail institutions. The same resource indicates that, in 2011, the DHS prevented $1.5 billion in potential losses through cybercrime investigations. The distributed architecture of networks results not only in faster propagation of cyberattacks, but it also affects a greater number of vulnerable cyberdevices. For example, in 2003, the Slammer worm infected more than 90% of vulnerable hosts in 10 minutes (Moore et al., 2003; tinyurl.com/koweuj5). Traditional security models are not able to keep up with the security attacks that propagate at machine speed.