Cyber Incident Landscape and Profiling: Exploring Patterns, Motives, and Impacts Through EuRepoC Data

Cyber incidents present a significant challenge faced by organizations and information systems. Given the increasing number of threats and attacks targeting critical data, the analysis and management of cyber incidents become crucial in mitigating negative consequences on business operations, privacy, and security. The goal of this paper is two-fold: i) to conduct the landscape of cyber incidents in order to describe the structure of perpetrators, the temporal distribution of cyber incidents, motives, targets, and responses to cyber incidents, and ii) to detect clusters of cyber incidents for the purpose of profiling them. In order to do so, an analysis of data from the European Repository of Cyber Incidents - EuRepoC regarding cyber incidents since 2000 will be conducted using descriptive statistics and cluster analysis. The data contains 3394 incidents described in media articles. Cyber incidents are described using attributes grouped into six categories: Metadata, Technical Data, Political Data, Legal Data, Attribution Data, and Indices of Cyber Intensity and Impact, along with Indices of intensity and impact of cyber incidents.