Cyber Warfare Defense Report for the
Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer
Introduction
Despite being unmatched technologically in the battlefields, the low-cost, simple, complex and expensive asymmetric threats have proved to be significantly dangerous to the security of any country. While cyber-attacks are increasingly driven by automated processes, human beings still operate at human speeds. Today, cybercrime has developed and adversaries have gained sponsorship from governments, international organizations or individuals for their selfish interests. The most recent development in cyber-attacks are the advanced persistent threats. According to Vert, Gonen and Brown (2014), these kinds of attacks are known of being sophisticated and slow moving over a long period of time. Advanced persistent threats are computer network attacks in which unauthorized individuals gain access to network systems or its resources and continues to use the resources without detection for a long period of time. By definition, advanced persistent threats are highly sophisticated networked entity, typical of organized groups of attackers, which conduct hostile cyber-attacks against a computer system. As described in the scenario, the western interconnection power grid faces such a challenge. Adversaries intend to use malwares to gain access to the network system at the power grid.
A. Analysis of the problem and Safeguards against the problem The lifecycle of an advanced persistent threat follows a six step process as shown in the diagram that follows. The first phase, the information collect, involves the attackers collecting all the necessary information and deciding which of these information is applicable to achieve his/her objectives. In the second phase, the initial compromise, the adversary designs and plans the attack. This occurs through the application of