Security Attack Behavioural Pattern Analysis for Critical Service Providers

Abstract

Identifying potential system attacks that define security requirements is crucial to building secure cyber systems. Moreover, the attack frequency makes their subsequent analysis challenging and arduous in cyber–physical systems (CPS). Since CPS include people, organisations, software, and infrastructure, a thorough security attack analysis must consider both strategic (social and organisational) aspects and technical (software and physical infrastructure) aspects. Studying cyberattacks and their potential impact on internal and external assets in cyberspace is essential for maintaining cyber security. The importance is reflected in the work of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), which receives IT incident reports from essential service providers mandated by the NIS directive of the European Union and Swedish government agencies. To tackle this problem, a multi-realm security attack event monitoring framework was proposed to monitor, model, and analyse security events in social(business process), cyber, and physical infrastructure components of cyber–physical systems. This paper scrutinises security attack patterns and the corresponding security solutions for Swedish government agencies and organisations within the EU’s NIS directive. A pattern analysis was conducted on 254 security incident reports submitted by critical service providers. A total of five critical security attacks, seven vulnerabilities (commonly known as threats), ten attack patterns, and ten parallel attack patterns were identified. Moreover, we employed standard mitigation techniques obtained from recognised repositories of cyberattack knowledge, namely, CAPEC and Mitre, in order to conduct an analysis of the behavioural patterns