Prioritization of Cybersecurity Measures

Abstract

The considerable losses caused by the low level of cyber security of companies, institutions and so on and the limited financial resources available imply the need to prioritize the implementation of measures to counter cyber attacks. For this purpose, the respective optimization problem is formulated as a Boolean mathematical programming one. At large dimensions, the use of known methods of solving the problem requires a large volume of calculations. That’s why, a simple rule for approximately solving the problem is obtained. By computer simulation, it is shown that the error of the solution when using this rule decreases considerably with the increase of the number of cybersecurity measures, more accurate – the more detailed such measures are. In order to reduce the error of solutions, three other simple algorithms are also proposed. The latter of these algorithms is more detailed and allows to reduce to a greater extent the solutions’ error.