Estimating Potential IT Security Losses: An Alternative Quantitative Approach

Abstract

In this article, we look at the potential relationship between the cost of IT security breaches and port-scan records - specifically, we postulate that the irregular movement of port-scan records is quite similar to stock exchange price dynamics, which have been partially satisfied with stochastic movement and Poisson arrival processing. By intuition, stochastic process methodology can emulate an enterprise's information IT security situation. Our proposed generic approach provides a reasonable procedure to estimate and evaluate IT security risk through data mining of port-scan logs