A macro method for measuring economic‐benefit returns on cybersecurity investments: The table top approach

Abstract

AbstractCritical considerations in engineering today's systems are securing the collection, access, and dissemination of the information they contain. Advanced computing technologies, ubiquitous environments, and sophisticated networks enable globally distributed access to data and information repositories to an uncountable community of consumers. Engineering security into these systems is more challenging and sophisticated than ever before. Along with this, assuring the integrity of highly networked systems requires economic decisions in rapidly changing technology and threat environments. Recognizing that countermeasures effective against cyber intrusions today can be ineffective tomorrow, the systems engineering community needs a rapid and agile way to identify the efficacies of competing countermeasure investment decisions. This paper presents a macroanalytic method for measuring economic‐benefit returns on investments in cybersecurity. The method is called the Table Top Approach. The table top approach is designed to place light demands on the granularity of inputs to evaluate the impacts of cyber intrusion events and the benefits of countermeasure investments. The table top approach derives which investments in a set of competing choices offer the greatest cost‐benefit gains in cyber defense, and why. It finds sets of Pareto efficient cost‐benefit investments, and their economic returns, that capture tangible and intangible advantages of countermeasures that strengthen cybersecurity. ©2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16