# Smart Airport Cybersecurity: Threat Mitigation and Cyber Resilience Controls +
## 5 Smart Airports Attacks: Scenario Development
### Malicious Attacks Motives  
In this section, we introduce the attacker's motivation into our scenario analysis, since people, while performing a malicious action, may fall on a subjective spectrum of good and evil. According to Safe Skies research [25] motives of cyber attackers fall into four general categories, all of which can reduce airport's operational efficiency, as listed below:  
1. Political or Military: Foreign military or intelligence-related sources have the competences to conduct the most serious and harmful attacks. Their purpose is to gain some military, political, or strategic insight, affecting confidentiality, integrity and availability of systems to undermine public trust. Airports are highly symbolic and attractive targets for such attacks, where any disruption, impacts confidence in air traveling and national airspace safety.
2. Commercial Espionage: Attackers with commercial espionage motivations are usually aligned to steal or damage confidential or proprietary information in order to gain commercial intelligence from private and public companies. This kind of attack aims to defraud, blackmail, obtain financial gains or targets corporate strategic goals. Examples of such commercial espionage targets are airports' administration documents, including planning, construction, budget, financial, legal and government-related documents.
3. Peer Group Disruption: Peer groups such as vandals, activists, or outsiders, along with a wide variety of individuals may engage in cyber-attacks, in order to disrupt or disable access to resources. They usually claim to have political reasons such as to protest, create economic harm, or rise status within their peer group. Distributed denial-of-service attacks are common examples in the airport environment, where attackers strive to prevent access to airport's website or disrupt online services.
4. Cybercrime: Attackers usually target networks and systems directly for data, in order to steal and resell valuable data, such as customer identification, credit card, or banking information. This is one of the most rapidly growing areas of attacks nowadays [25]. Airports that handle credit card information for paying services, such as baggage fees or parking allotments could be prime targets for these attackers. Although these attacks may be less sophisticated than the other types, cybercrime techniques and tools have been recently improved and become easier to obtain and use. For example, by using ransomware or destructive malware, attackers are able to encrypt or even destroy data and afterwards threaten their victims to pay a great amount of ransom (usually in bitcoins), in order to unlock data or refrain from exposing sensitive information.  
Table 2 attributes to malicious threat scenarios discussed, the cybersecurity impact on assets according to the CIA triad (Confidentiality-Integrity-Availability) and the categories of cyber attackers who may be evolved in such malicious actions, according to their motives.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline  & & & **Impact on** & & & & **Malicious Attack Motives** & \\ \cline{3-10}
**Scenario** & **Malicious Attack Scenario** & & & & & & & & \\
**No** & & & & & & & & \\ \hline
1 & Distributed Denial of Service attacks & & & & & & & & \\
2 & Communication attack to ATM systems & & & & & & & & \\
3 & Malicious Software on Airports' Network & & & & & & & \\
4 & Tampering with airport self-seerving systems & & & & & & & \\
5 & Network attack to CCITY systems & & & & & & & \\
6 & MISS of Authorization & & & & & & & \\
7 & Email Phishing and Social Engineering Attacks & & & & & & & \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: Malicious attack motives analysis.