Building a Social Dimensional Threat Model from Current and Historic Events of Cyber Attacks

The volume of cyber attacks has increased tremendously in the recent years. Many of these cyber attacks can be linked to current and historic events in the social, political, economic, and cultural (SPEC) dimensions in the human world. In this paper, we analyze the expression of such cyber attacks in news media and publications based on past social events, explore the factors in social dimension that triggered the cyber attacks, and map these factors to concepts in a cyber attack domain model. The goal of this research is to gain a better understanding of the likelihood of cyber attacks upon social disturbances in the human world. Such insight would allow predictions to be made about an impending cyber attack, the means and methods with which such attacks could be carried out, the potential victims, and the time and duration of the attacks. In our future work, we aim to utilize our models to provide early warnings such that necessary defenses can be built up before cyber attacks occur in response to disturbances in the SPEC dimensions.