On Achieving Fast Damage Appraisal in case of Cyber Attacks

Purpose Invasion of information systems through electronic media has become rampant with the outburst of Internet technologies and their applications. An information attack brings a system to unstable and inconsistent state [1], [3]. In such cases, the system under attack cannot differentiate an attacker from a legitimate user. Once the attacking transaction modifies some data in the database and commits, its effect becomes permanent and available to other users. Then, the damage can spread to other parts of the database through legitimate users as they update fresh data after reading damaged data [2], [4]. The damage will propagate through the database with delay in recovery. Hence it is absolutely imperative to perform immediate damage assessment and recovery, as soon as an attack is detected, to stop the cascading effect of the damage. The objective of this research is to develop accurate and fast damage assessment techniques to recover the database in real-time in the event of an intrusion.