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Systematically Understanding the Cyber Attack Business: A Survey
Open accessAbstract
Cyber attacks are increasingly menacing businesses. Based on the literature review and publicly available reports, this article conducts an extensive and consistent survey of the services used by the cybercrime business, organized using the value chain perspective, to understand cyber attack in a systematic way. Understanding the specialization, commercialization, and cooperation for cyber attacks helps us to identify 24 key value-added activities and their relations. These can be offered “as a service” for use in a cyber attack. This framework helps to understand the cybercriminal service ecosystem and hacking innovations. Finally, a few examples are provided showing how this framework can help to build a more cyber immune system, like targeting cybercrime control-points and assigning defense responsibilities to encourage collaboration.
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“Some services that facilitate cyber attacks include training and recruiting, development of exploitative software, scanning networks, denying service, phishing, target ranking, and money laundering. These services are provided as subscriptions, licenses, pay-per-records, or commission-based services [5,19].”
From Impact, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation Strategies for Cyber-Secure Critical Infrastructure. (2023) · cites this paper as [5]
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“Certain zero-day exploits and socially engineered credential theft are expected to remain perpetual weak points in computer networks for the foreseeable future [5].”
From Impact, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation Strategies for Cyber-Secure Critical Infrastructure. (2023) · cites this paper as [5]
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“In [5], a literature review yields an extensive and consistent survey of the services used by the cybercrime business, organized using the value chain perspective, to understand cyber attacks systematically.”
From Impact, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation Strategies for Cyber-Secure Critical Infrastructure. (2023) · cites this paper as [5]
The cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“The cybercriminal economy has emerged worldwide, enabling many types of cyber attack functions as a service.”
From Impact, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation Strategies for Cyber-Secure Critical Infrastructure. (2023) · cites this paper as [5]
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Citations
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Impact, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation Strategies for Cyber-Secure Critical Infrastructure.
Riggs, H., Tufail, S., Parvez, I., Tariq, M., Khan, M. A., Amir, A., Vuda, K. V., & Sarwat, A. I. (2023) · Sensors · doi:10.3390/s23084060 · Cited by 124
Metadata
- Authors
- Huang, K., Siegel, M., & Madnick, S.
- Affiliations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Venue
- ACM Computing Surveys
- Published
- 2018-07-06
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1-36
- ISSN
- 0360-0300 (ISSN-L)
- 1557-7341
- OpenAlex
- W2860610442
- Cited by
- 112
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 10
- FWCI
- 14.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- ACM Computing Surveys (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (61502333)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Law › Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information and Cyber Security
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies
- Keywords
- cybercrime, value chain, cyber defense
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