Economic Impact of Cyber Attacks on Critical Infrastructures

Critical infrastructures ensure that activities that are vital and important for individuals can be safely delivered to the society uninterruptedly. The damage on these critical infrastructures caused by cyber-attacks whose control is carried out through computers and network systems is very large. Cyber-attacks directly or indirectly affect companies, institutions, and organizations economically and cause great financial losses. In this chapter, two different categories, energy and finance sector, which are described as critical infrastructure, are discussed; cyber-attacks carried out on these sectors, cyber-attack weapons, and economic losses caused by these attacks are examined.

Enhanced Security for Network Communication With Proposed IS-IS Protocol

This chapter is a literature review of intermediate system to intermediate system (IS-IS) routing protocol to provide basic security mechanisms against cyber-attacks and enhance network security. IS-IS was originally developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as a link state routing protocol. It was first built with the ability to route CLNPs or connectionless network protocols according to the OSI standard equal to IP. IS-IS is also developed so that it can accommodate routing for any layer three-based protocol. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1990 specified the support for IP and introduced IPv6 extensions in 2000. IS-IS protocol implementation was written as modules in order for it to be distributed freely and easily installed on the GNU routing software. SourceForge.net supported the project and gave access for developers to easily contribute to the project. The chapter elaborates the ISIS routing protocol for network security and proposes a critical survey on security routing protocols.

A Review of the Economic Benefits of Cyber Terrorism

The internet technologies have made it even easier for terrorist activities to migrate smoothly to the internet. Nations are now benefiting from the act of cyberterrorism, making it more difficult to successfully fight this monster. This chapter aims to draw up a review on various published work addressing the financial benefits of cyberterrorism. The question is to know if economic benefits alone is significantly strong enough to encourage more cyberterrorism activities. Should this be the case, what can be done to curb this deadly cancer from spreading further? Scientific methods could prove to be a much efficient solution to the issue of cyber terrorism. But how is that going to happen and for how long should we wait to see this happen? Would it ever happen? Considering that the internet is an ever-growing technology with endless possibilities for both attackers and crime investigative specialist, do we forsee a cyber war between nations who can boost of better fighting and defending technologies? These questions and many more are discussed based on recent literature.

Intelligent Strategy and Security in Education

Text analytics applies to most businesses, particularly education segments; for instance, if association or university is suspicious about data secrets being spilt to contenders by the workers, text analytics investigation can help dissect many employees' email messages. The massive volume of both organized and unstructured data principally started from the web-based social networking (media) and Web 2.0. The investigation (analysis) of messages online, tweets, and different types of unstructured text data constitute what we call text analytics, which has been developed during the most recent few years in a way that does not shift, through the upheaval of various algorithms and applications being utilized for the processing of data alongside the protection and IT security. This chapter plans to find common problems faced when using the different medium of data usage in education, one can analyze their information through the perform of sentiment analysis using text analytics by extracting useful information from text documents using IBM's annotation query language (AQL).

Android Application Security

Android is a free, open source platform that allows any developer to submit apps to the Android Market with no restrictions. This enables hackers to pass their malicious apps to the Android Market as legitimate apps. The central issue lies at the heart of the Android permission mechanism, which is not capable of blocking malicious apps from accessing sensitive phone resources (e.g., contact info and browsing history); it either allows or disallows apps from accessing the resources requested by the app at the installation time. This chapter investigated the scope of this issue and concluded that hackers use malicious apps as attack vectors to compromise Android smartphones and steal confidential data and that no security solutions exist to combat malicious apps. The researcher suggested designing a real time monitoring application to detect and deter malicious apps from compromising users' sensitive data; such application is necessary for Android users to protect their privacy and prevent financial loss.

Dark Web and Its Research Scopes

Internet has become the most unavoidable phenomenon in our daily life. Together with it has risen the most unfathomable aftermath of anonymity exploitation. The internet available for the normal users are limited to the sites that are directly indexed by common search engines. But apart from these contents, a major portion of the internet lies hidden from regular search engines and is not available to users resorting to ordinary browsers. This part forms the deep web and within it lies the darkest part also known as dark web. Several illegal activities take place in this darkest part, including child pornography, financial fraudulence, drug deployment, and many others. Thus, countermeasures to put a curb on these activities are very much required. The chapter focuses on the most relevant research areas and possible research scopes in the area of the dark web.

From Conventional to Sophisticated

Improvements in the technology unequivocally aids everyday life. These advancements lead states to save time and money. The crucial point is the facilitation that the internet and cyber services offer. Internet can be used for providing services to the citizens and can be benefitted while storing massive amounts of data. Nevertheless, cyberspace comes with serious problems too. The security of the data that have been transferred to the digital space ought to be protected in absolute terms. In cases of lack of securitization, cyberspace becomes vulnerable to attacks and, obviously, terrorist organizations can benefit from this. The Middle East, too, is an arena for such actions. But, the particular importance of the region reveals itself via its affiliation with the most widespread and dangerous terrorist organizations. Their ability to use the internet for propaganda and organizing attacks should not be disdained. Referencing these, this chapter will focus on the transfer of conventional terrorism to cyberspace in the Middle East.

Cyber Security and Open Source Intelligence Techniques

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is one of the most confrontational topics in cyber security in today's world where technology and data transfer methods are highly developed. It is known that many organizations and individuals use OSINT as an information gathering tool during data transfer over the internet and provide many personal or corporate information access. OSINT is a systematic method that is produced by official and private organizations via sources such as the internet or the media. In recent years there has been some debate about the security and privacy of this information, especially with the widespread use of social media. In this chapter, the control of information obtained by OSINT the security will explain the positive effects on this control mechanism.

Taxonomy of Cyber Attack Weapons, Defense Strategies, and Cyber War Incidents

Cyber security is the newest internal concern of this century where different technologies developed through telecommunication, computers, and internet are used in the international arena as cyber-weapons. This chapter provides in-depth information about up-to-date cyber-attack methods and mechanisms used in the cyber war, and it focuses on the cyber war incidents starting from 1982 with Siberia Natural Gas Explosion until 2015 Russia-Turkey cyber-attack conflict and between variety of developed and developing countries in detail. In addition to this, cyber-weapons developed by Russia, USA, and Israel targeting critical infrastructure are elaborated. The chapter concludes with the use of cyber-attack methods and tools with their taxonomy and elaborates the fundamentals of cyber defense strategies to these proposed attacks with existing solutions from the literature.

A Review of Research Studies on Cyber Terror

Thanks to the internet, the distances between the countries are easily overcome and the communication network rapidly expands. This situation also affects the cyber security of the countries to a great extent. Attacks on critical infrastructures, companies, and public institutions can be magnitude that make great harms. These developments in cyber space bring new problems. One of them is cyber terror. Cyber terror does not have a certain and well-known definition. Cyber terror is the realization of terrorist acts in the field of cyber war. In addition, cyber space is a place of display for terrorist acts. The effects of cyber terror attacks have reached a level to scare all countries. There is not enough information about the definition, characteristics, methods used in cyber terror attacks and cyber terror groups. It is important for national administrators and staff to become conscious and to become informed about cyber terror. In this chapter, information will be presented, endeavors on awareness-creation will be made, and a role of guiding the future studies will be taken.