Cybercrime in Ukraine and the Cyber Security Game

Abstract

This paper reviews some massive cyber-attacks in Ukraine. It demonstrates the scale and dynamics of cybercrime in Ukraine. Motivated by cybercrime we develop a two-player two-strategy matrix game between a defender that can either protect its strategic asset or leave it unprotected, and a defender that can either attack the defender’s asset, or not. We assume that defending and attacking strategies are costly, and the value of the strategic asset is higher than are the costs of defending /attacking it. We show that under generic conditions on parameters the game has a single mixed Nash equilibrium. At this equilibrium the probability that the attacker will attack decreases with the value of the asset while the probability that the defender will actively defend increases.