Assessment of Security Threats via Network Topology Analysis: An Initial Investigation

Computer networks have increasingly been the focus of cyber attack, such as botnets, which have a variety of serious cybersecurity implications. As a consequence, understanding their behaviour is an important step towards the mitigation of such threat. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on network topology to assess the spreading and potential security impact of botnets. Our main motivation is to provide a toolbox to classify and analyse the security threats posed by botnets based on their dynamical and statistical behaviour. This would potentially lead to a better understanding and prediction of cybersecurity issues related to computer networks. Our initial validation shows the potential of our method providing relevant and accurate results.