Utilising journey mapping and crime scripting to combat cyber crime and cyber warfare attacks

摘要

Modern society is now reliant on digital communication and networks for conducting a wide array of tasks, ranging from simple acts such as browsing the web through to mission critical tasks such as the management of critical infrastructure and industrial controls. This reliance shows a growing emphasis on strategic importance of cyberspace (Sharma, 2010). While organisations and individuals are keenly exploiting the benefits of cyberspace, these same platforms have also opened new avenues for nefarious actors in the pursuit of their criminal activities to attack, disrupt, or steal from organisations and individuals. Criminal organisations and lone criminals worldwide have access to powerful, evolving capabilities which they use to identify and target their victims allowing for the perpetration of a wide variety of cyber crimes. Cyber attacks and the term ‘cyber warfare’1 has come to use more regularly and it is apparent that a new class of weapons has emerged: software viruses, Trojan horses, logic bombs, etc. and where such weapons exist, then attackers exist also. The modus operandi of nationstate actors is not much different from that used by cyber criminals – with the exception of their end goals. ududThis paper discusses ways in which utilising methods from typically non-cyber disciplines – business and criminology – can successfully be applied to the cyber domain in order to help in the fight against and prevention of cyber attacks, including those used in Cyber Warfare. Through the provision of a visual representation, this paper clarifies how journey mapping and crime scripting can help in building an understanding of the steps criminals or adversaries in general undertake during execution of a cyber criminal or cyber warfare attacker. In essence, within our work we have deconstructed the lifecycle of attack events and translated the steps within it into a visualisation map to show the full event process, highlighting key steps as well as positive and negative events. Such work can be applied to military defence area, as it can aid in the decision processes when undertaking steps in pursuit, prevention, preparation and protection. The end goals of the two differ, but tactics and techniques – reconnaissance for, preparation of and execution of attacks – uses the same modus operandi.