Vulnerability in a cyberattack : How DoS affects Swedish government authorities

Abstract: With a growing development of technologies and the fact that many companies implements online services, an interruption in such service could cause problems for any kind of user by exploiting the vulnerabilities in these systems. The Swedish Armed Forces (SwAF) indicates that the development of the defensive ability must continue, since the vulnerability of the cyberenvironment becomes a greater interest for adversaries. A denial of service can create panic by e.g. force resources to look into the ongoing attack minimizing the awareness of the protection of other systems. Known attacking tools and statistics are presented in this thesis, but the scope is to generate a framework. The main aim is to look into the Swedish government authorities and give an insight of how a possible path for an increased resilience against a modern distributed denial of service attack could be and at the same time expand the knowledge and give a base for developing more secure systems. This thesis consists of a survey and simulations of network traffic behaviors in order to categorize and give a framework for a small, middle and large sized authority. The result shows that a small sized authority has a risk of 47% in not being able to survive an attack, while a middle sized authority only would have 17% as dangerous risk, since that is the risk of having attacks exceeding 60 Gbit/s. A large sized authority is defined by having a capacity of 100 Gbit/s. Therefore, an increased resilience is by exceeding 60 Gbit/s showing that 60% of the authorities within this thesis are prepared against a modern distributed denial of service attack. If an attack succeeds, the authorities are at greater risk to not be able to communicate externally and reach out to the society as impact.