Design, Modeling and Simulation of Cybercriminal Personality-Based Cyberattack Campaigns

Cybersecurity challenges are inherently complex, characterized by both advanced technical elements and complex aspects of human cognition. Although extensive research has explored how victims' human factors affect their susceptibility to cyberattacks, the influence of cybercriminals' personalities on the pattern of cyberattack campaigns and the resulting damage to organizations has not received equivalent attention. To bridge this research gap through computer simulation, we introduce a cyberattack campaign designer that enables modelers to construct cyberattack campaigns. This tool allows modelers to define how the process or pattern of the cyberattack campaign can change based on the cybercriminal's personality and simulates how these personality differences influence the magnitude of cyberattack damage on the target organization. In this paper, through computer simulation, we demonstrate how cautious and reckless personalities result in variations in the cyberattack pattern and, consequently, affect the magnitude of cyberattack damage, despite identical cyberattack objectives and techniques used at each step.