D’Amico, A., Buchanan, L., Goodall, J., & Walczak, P. (2010, April). Mission impact of cyber events: scenarios and ontology to express the relationships between cyber assets, missions and users. In International Conference on Information Warfare and Security (p. 388). Academic Conferences International Limited.
Awareness of the dependencies between cyber assets, missions and users is critical to assessing the mission impact of cyber attacks and maintaining continuity of business operations. However, there is no systematic method for defining the complex mapping between cyber assets (hardware, software, data), missions and users. This paper reports the results of an interdisciplinary workshop on how to map relationships between cyber assets and the users, missions, business processes and other entities that depend on those assets. The workshop yielded information about types of impact assessment beyond mission and financial analyses; scenarios illustrating the complex relationships between assets, mission and users; and models for expressing those relationships. The results will be used to develop a system that will automatically populate an ontology from commonly available network data and allow computer network defense, information technology and disaster recovery practitioners to query the system for information about the impact of the loss or degradation a cyber asset.
