The Cyber Security Ecosystem: Post-global Financial Crisis

Abstract

The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 resulted in recession in majority of the economies of the world. Information technology, considered to be one of the major enablers of all business activities, also underwent certain changes in this phase. New technologies such as cloud computing and mobile commerce emerged and continued to grow. However, along with these opportunities, threats to information security in the form of malicious attacks also grew. But such threats not only impacted individual organizations but all the organizations that were related to the target organization in some manner. In this study, we present a cyber security ecosystem which provides a holistic view of all the players present such as, network, cloud, and software providers. Governing bodies and reporting agencies also play an important role in this ecosystem. We also show the complex interactions among the players. These interactions can be used to arrive at correlated risks of the entire cyber security ecosystem in case of an information security breach on a target organization.