Paper detail

Organised Firestorm as strategy for business cyber-attacks

Having a good reputation is paramount for most organisations and companies. In fact, having an optimal corporate image allows them to have better transaction relationships with various customers and partners. However, such reputation is hard to build and easy to destroy for all kind of business commercial activities (B2C, B2B, B2B2C, B2G). A misunderstanding during the communication process to the customers, or just a bad communication strategy, can lead to a disaster for the entire company. This is emphasised by the reaction of millions of people on social networks, which can be very detrimental for the corporate image if they react negatively to a certain event. This is called a firestorm. In this paper, I propose a well-organised strategy for firestorm attacks on organisations, also showing how an adversary can leverage them to obtain private information on the attacked firm. Standard business security procedures are not designed to operate against multi-domain attacks; therefore, I will show how it is possible to bypass the classic and advised security procedures by operating different kinds of attack. I also propose a different firestorm attack, targeting a specific business company network in an efficient way. Finally, I present defensive procedures to reduce the negative effect of firestorms on a company.