WEIS 2009

Modeling the economic incentives of DDoS attacks: femtocell case study

Many of the Internet security incidents are caused by agents which act moved by economic incentives. When that is the case, it is possible to model attacker´s incentives by applying economics principles and, if we can collect appropriate data, we can use the model to have a better understanding of the risk imposed by these threats. This paper presents a simple model that represents the economic incentives for launching DDoS attacks against a specific telecommunications service. In addition, some data has been collected in order to quantify some of the variables of the model. Finally, some simulations have been performed to have a better knowledge of the risk of suffering this kind of attacks and propose solutions to mitigate it.