Title Talk: Outer Space Cyberattacks: Generating Novel Scenarios to Avoid Surprise
Abstract:
Though general awareness around it may be low, space cyberattacks are an increasingly urgent problem given the vital role that space systems play in the modern world. Open-source or public discussions about it typically revolve around only a couple generic scenarios, namely satellite hacking and signals jamming or spoofing. But there are so many more possibilities.
This talk will talk about the ICARUS matrix - an acronym for “Imagining Cyberattacks to Anticipate Risks Unique to Space” - more than four million unique scenarios can be generated and consider a much wider range of threats. The ICARUS matrix also captures the diversity of threat actors, their motivations, their victims and the space capabilities affected. These help to establish the core elements of a full scenario and answer the who, what, where, when, why and how questions.
A failure to imagine novel scenarios is a major risk in being taken by surprise and severely harmed by threat actors who are constantly devising new ways, inventive and resourceful ways, to breach the digital systems that control our wired world. To stay vigilant, defenders likewise need to be imaginative to keep up in this adversarial dance between hunter and prey in cybersecurity.
Outer space is the next frontier for cybersecurity. To guard against space cyberattacks, we need to understand and anticipate them, and imagination is at the very heart of both cybersecurity and frontiers.
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