An Introduction to Cyber Modeling and Simulation

1Brief Review of Cyber Incidents

When it comes to national security, I think this [i.e., cyber warfare] represents the battleground for the future. I’ve often said that I think the potential for the next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyber‐attack. If you have a cyber‐attack that brings down our power grid system, brings down our financial systems, brings down our government systems, you could paralyze this country.¹

Leon Panetta

The 1988 Morris Worm, designed to estimate the size of the Internet, caused the shutting down of thousands of machines and resulted in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding the first Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). As shown in Table 1.1, cyberattacks have continued since 1988, with effects that range from data collection to controlling critical infrastructure.

Table 1.1 Select cyber incidents.

Year	Cyberattack	Objective	Effects
1988	Morris Worm	Understand the number of hosts connected to the Internet	Removed thousands of computers from operation
2003	Slammer Worm	Denial of service	Disabled Ohio's Davis–Besse nuclear power plant safety monitoring system for nearly 5 h
2008	Conficker	Implant malware on target machines	Control target machines
2010	STUXNET	Take control of Siemens industrial control systems (ICS’)	Destroyed centrifuges used for Iranian nuclear program
2012	Saudi Aramco (oil provider) business systems (aka Al Shamoon)	Wipe disks on Microsoft Windows‐based ...