Cyber Security, 2nd Edition

5 CYBER THREATS

In this chapter, we shall examine the various types of threat that individuals and organisations face, including types of attacker, types of attack, the motivations for and the benefits of launching an attack, the risks involved in doing so and how attacks typically are conducted.

There are a number of terms associated with cyber threats that are worth exploring before we look into the types of threat in greater detail:

• Threat source or sponsor is the person or organisation that wishes to benefit from attacking an information asset. Threat sources often pay or otherwise pressurise threat actors to attack information assets on their behalf.
• Threat actors or agents are the individuals or groups of individuals who actually ...