Cyber Defenses: Classifications & Taxonomies

The terms cyber defense, cyber countermeasure, and cyber threat are interrelated as follows. In the general case, a cyber defense is the aggregate of activities that are intended to eliminate or mitigate the effects of cyber threats, which are potential cyber attacks that have may have been assigned a certain possibility of occurring. In the more specific case, a cyber countermeasure is a particular defense activity that is aimed to eliminate or mitigate the effects of a specific cyber attack.

For example, IDS (Intrusion Detection System) and IPS (Intrusion Protection System) products are cyber countermeasures designed to detect and protect against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyber threats. However, in practice, IDS/IPS products that detect DDoS attacks at the application layer are ineffective in thwarting DDoS attacks that employ legal protocol packets to attack their targets.