A Taxonomy of Cyber Events Affecting Communities

Communities, whose reliance on critical cyber infrastructures is growing, are threatened by a wide range of cyber events that can adversely affect these systems and networks. The development of computer security taxonomies to classify computer and network vulnerabilities and attacks has led to a greater insight into the causes, effects, mitigation, and remediation of cyber attacks. In developing these taxonomies researchers are better able to understand and address the many different attacks that can occur. No current taxonomy, however, has been developed that takes into account the community aspects of cyber attacks or other cyber events affecting communities. We present a new taxonomy that considers the motivation, methodology, and effects of cyber events that can affect communities. We include a discussion on how our taxonomy is useful to e-government, industry, and security researchers.