Approaches to understanding the motivations behind cyber attacks

Cyber-attacks appear to have grown in the past few years. Many policy changes have been made to control them, however, a clear path to a safe and secure cyber world is not visible. A mere technical view to confront the cyber-attacks could be futile if motivations behind attacks are not understood. To understand the motives behind cyber-attacks, we look at cyber-attacks as societal events associated with social, economic, cultural and political factors. To find factors that encourage unsafe cyber activities, we build a network of aggregate country-to-country cyber-attacks, and compare the network with other country-to-country networks. In particular, we use variable correlation and network correlation (QAP) to examine the relevance of factors like income difference, alliance-hostility, internet penetration, and corruption. We observe that higher corruption and a large internet bandwidth favors attacks origination. We also find that countries with higher Per-capita-GDP and better Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure are targeted more often.