Modeling Network Systems Under Simultaneous Cyber-Attacks

Modeling cyber-attacks is a very attractive area of research because of its practical importance. However, most of the related research in the literature does not consider the simultaneous (or coordinated) attacks, which, in fact, is an important attack instrument in practice. This is mainly because of the complicated evolution of cyber-attacks over networks. In this paper, we propose a novel model, which can accommodate different types of simultaneous attacks with possible heterogeneous compromise probabilities. Our results show that simultaneous attacks have a significant effect on the reliability/dynamics of network systems. In particular, we present a sufficient condition for the epidemics dying out over the network, and upper bounds for the time to extinction. We also provide upper bounds for compromise probabilities of network systems when the evolution enters the quasi-equilibrium state. The effects of strength of simultaneous attacks and heterogeneity among successful attack probabilities on epidemic spreading are studied as well. The theoretical results are further validated by the simulation evidence.