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Abhishta

Publications and source records attributed to Abhishta.

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Comparing Alternatives to Measure the Impact of DDoS Attack Announcements on Target Stock Prices

The attack intensity of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is increasing every year. Botnets based on internet of things (IOT) devices are now being used to conduct DDoS attacks. The estimation of direct and indirect economic damages caused by these attacks is a complex problem. One of the indirect damage of a DDoS attack can be on the market value of the victim firm. In this article we analyze the impact of 45 different DDoS attack announcements on victim's stock prices. We find that previous studies have a mixed conclusion on the impact of DDoS attack announcements on the victim's stock price. Hence, in this article we evaluate this impact using three different approaches and compare the results. In the first approach, we use the assume the cumulative abnormal returns to be normally distributed and test the hypothesis that a DDoS attack announcement has no impact on the victim's stock price. In the latter two methods, we do not assume a distribution and use the empirical distribution of cumulative abnormal returns to test the hypothesis. We find that the assumption of cumulative abnormal returns being normally distributed leads to overestimation/underestimation of the impact. Finally, we analyze the impact of DDoS attack announcement on victim's stock price in each of the 45 cases and present our results.

q-fin.ST

Analysing The Impact Of A DDoS Attack Announcement On Victim Stock Prices

DDoS attacks are increasingly used by `hackers' and `hacktivists' for various purposes. A number of on-line tools are available to launch an attack of significant intensity. These attacks lead to a variety of losses at the victim's end. We analyse the impact of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack announcements over a period of 5 years on the stock prices of the victim firms. We propose a method for event studies that does not assume the cumulative abnormal returns to be normally distributed, instead we use the empirical distribution for testing purposes. In most cases we find no significant impact on the stock returns but in cases where a DDoS attack creates an interruption in the services provided to the customer, we find a significant negative impact.

cs.CE

Business Model of a Botnet

Botnets continue to be an active threat against firms or companies and individuals worldwide. Previous research regarding botnets has unveiled information on how the system and their stakeholders operate, but an insight on the economic structure that supports these stakeholders is lacking. The objective of this research is to analyse the business model and determine the revenue stream of a botnet owner. We also study the botnet life-cycle and determine the costs associated with it on the basis of four case studies. We conclude that building a full scale cyber army from scratch is very expensive where as acquiring a previously developed botnet requires a little cost. We find that initial setup and monthly costs were minimal compared to total revenue.

cs.CY