Exploratory Research of Cyber Security Dimensions: Selected Use Cases Analysis

Introduction

The exponential growth in the number of incidents in cyberspace has become a concern for every individual. Organizations are investigating enormous resources to tackle the menace of cyber-attack; however, they are still not foolproof. The economics of cyber security is a very interesting domain for researchers to study the causal relationship of heterogonous factors. One of the dominating factors that the attackers exploit cyberspace is financial gain. The variety of cybercrimes can be seen as a product line with different values to be realized if seen from the context of consumerism. It is also interesting to observe that the nature of cyber incidents is changing and evolving from simple logic based to malicious code to tricking human minds. The sophistication of attacks is increasing over time and becoming more and more complicated (Li & Liu, 2021).

Cyber security has become the top priority for the organization, governments and other stakeholders. The rough estimates show that the market reached 173.5 billion in 2022 (Markets and Markets, 2023). Protecting information in cyberspace is highly challenging. The data leakage alone was USD 4.35 million in 2022 (IBM Security, 2022). Ransomware attacks have become a revenue generation industry for many involved in such businesses, with a whopping $ 14 billion in the 2022 global market size (Searchlogistics, 2023). Some industries vulnerable to ransomware attacks are the health sector, financial institutions, ICT companies, etc.

Similarly, if we look at the attacks landscape in the critical infrastructure sector, the highly sophisticated malware targets ways to penetrate the system without getting detected. Another threat that is quite a concern is the insider threat, and therefore critical infrastructure companies are using techniques like design in privacy to handle it. Another attack vector surfacing in the threat landscape is using social engineering techniques to exploit information systems. Attackers are using tricks and techniques to compromise the human decision-making process and compromising information systems. Social engineering-based attacks have become quite popular, and countries with significant populations are the most affected.

Cyber security as a field of research is trending. Researchers are trying to explore directly, indirectly and associative areas of research in the domain of cyber security as the potential domain of research which is scientific and has a future potential. Cybersecurity research is categorized as fundamental research, mainly cryptography. However, this research domain is relatively essential but limited in its way, and researchers are looking more into the applied side of cyber security. Applied cyber security requires much of experimental and validation aspects. Researchers must also find a robust framework for validating the outcome in real-time. There is also a lot of interdisciplinary research. This category of cyber security research is linked with overlapping areas, e.g., computer vision is used in cyber security space, and natural language processing (NLP) is applied in securing cyberspace. Similarly, digital signal processing is used in biometric systems. The fundamental point of differentiation is that the application of the research is in the domain of cyber security, but the scientific model is being adopted from other fields of research.