An Innovative Cyber Security based Approach for National Infrastructure Resiliency for Sultanate of Oman

Abstract

Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) within Oman is becoming Inter-independent to each other, aiming to provide unified and faultless services from the perspective of economics, quality, and governance. The new structure of interconnectivity between the CNI organizations has allowed sharing critical factors in benefiting from other CNI resources and services. Since this interconnectivity has permitted services and system to be more communicative and accessible via the internet, this has allowed some of the cyber threats to create a challenge to secure. Allowing such services to be available via the internet will also add to the fact that this services would be vulnerable to a variety of existing attacks.The latest global events related to Cyberterrorist attacks, have shown to the world how serious this matter. In this article, we present a systematic approach after reviewing existing papers to building resilient cyber security networked systems. We first study fundamental elements of cyber security, cyberspace, CNI and its impact. Then we used qualitative methodology and case studies methods for better understanding the global incidents. This understanding drives the organizations of a distributed multilevel architecture that lets the network defend itself against, detect, and dynamically respond to upcoming challenges. The recent attacks like operation petrol besides financial sector attacks in Oman shown the vulnerability of CNI system. In this case, we take the bank Muscat Visa attack as an example where they have announced that there visa credit card have been violated and a group of hackers compromised the system. To have better control and to handle on this matter, the management of such incidents should have been treated by a Cyber Center, who is well equipped and trained to handle this type of events. This paper proposes an innovative Cyber Security based approach for National Infrastructure Resiliency for Sultanate of Oman which can be used as a framework of initiating National Cyber Security Centre aiming to monitor and control the CNI cyber threats and increase the awareness and readiness within the related organization based on many published article and study in this field. Finally, this paper opens the door to establish this type of center in the country in addition to offers future research directions to develop and implement a new and useful technique in the field.