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Cyber Espionage and Cyber Defence

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Abstract

Nation states engage in cyber espionage because they hope to gain an advantage. Cyber espionage is attractive because it is less risky than traditional espionage; there are no spies that have to enter foreign territory. After introducing the basic protection goals of information security (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) as well as fundamental security design principles, we describe typical attack vectors. As state-sponsored hacking is well funded, defensive measures are inconvenient and costly. We also present the attack-defence tree technique which helps defenders to consider all relevant attacks and countermeasures. Finally, we show that security vulnerabilities play an essential role in many attacks. Intelligence services state that their goal is to defend their homeland. However, citizens and business owners may be at the losing end: practices of stockpiling zero-day exploits and inserting backdoors on purpose make everybody less secure.

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References

Recommended Reading

  • Almeshekah, M. H., Spafford, E. H., and Atallah, M. J. (2013). Improving security using deception. Center for Education and Research Information Assurance and Security, Purdue University, Tech. Rep. CERIAS Tech Report 13, 2013.

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  • Heartfield, R. and Loukas, G. (2015). A Taxonomy of Attacks and a Survey of Defense Mechanisms for Semantic Social Engineering Attacks. ACM Comput. Surv. 48, 3 (2016), 38 pages

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  • Rid, T., Buchanan, B. (2015). Attributing Cyber-attacks, Journal of Strategic Studies, 38:1-2, 4-37.

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  • Stoll, C. (1989). The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage. Doubleday, New York, NY, USA.

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Correspondence to Dominik Herrmann .

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© 2019 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature

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Herrmann, D. (2019). Cyber Espionage and Cyber Defence. In: Reuter, C. (eds) Information Technology for Peace and Security. Springer Vieweg, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25652-4_5

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