Conflict spectrum: An empirical study of geopolitical cyber threats from a social network perspective

Abstract

The current evolution of the cyber-threat ecosystem shows that no state or organization is safe from cyber threats. It is therefore important to understand factors that may influence cyber risk. In this paper, we highlight the geopolitical context of cyber threats. The key idea is to verify the assumption that cyber threats are correlated to geopolitical events. We use social network techniques to model our problem as a network. We investigate the relationship between cyber threats and geopolitical events through the measure of similarity between two graphs using the QAP-correlation method. To verify this assumption empirically, we use data from the GDELT project. The results of QAP-correlation measure show a significant similarity between the cyber events graph and the geopolitical events graph in terms of graph isomorphism and structure.