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47 lines
4.7 KiB
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layout: post
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title: "Improving Cybersecurity Impact Taxonomies"
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date: 2024-12-08 00:01:00
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categories: infosec
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---
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# Improving Cybersecurity Taxonomies Describing Impact and Cyber Harms Against Organizations
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If you work in the cybersecurity field, the term `impact` is ubiquitous, appearing frequently in information security regulations such as NIS2 (and previously NIS1). It plays a critical role in reporting obligations and the definition of a `significant cyber threat`.
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The definition and classification of `impact` have been subjects of debate for some time. I recently incorporated a MISP taxonomy inspired by a [2018 publication](https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/4/1/tyy006/5133288?login=false) titled *"A taxonomy of cyber-harms: Defining the impacts of cyber-attacks and understanding how they propagate."* This publication offers a detailed taxonomy of cyber-harms experienced by organizations, helping to better define and classify the impacts of cyber-attacks.
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If you are incident responder or DFIR practioners, it's giving a good way to classify the impact of what you analyse or used as discussion source for the victims of the cyber attacks. Even within a SOC or CSIRT team, you can use consistent terminology to classify the actual impact.
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The [organizational cyber harms taxonomy](https://www.misp-project.org/taxonomies.html#_organizational_cyber_harm) is divided into several clear categories (predicates):
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- **physical-digital**
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- **economic**
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- **psychological**
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- **reputational**
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- **social-societal**
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For example, the **economic** category provides a well-defined set of impacts that can be applied in various organizational contexts and cases, ranging from `disrupted-operations` and `reduced-profits` to `pr-response-costs`.
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In 2015, when we began designing the MISP taxonomy format, we didn’t anticipate the widespread success of the [misp-taxonomies repository](https://github.com/misp/misp-taxonomies). Today, it is widely used across various open source (and proprietary) threat intelligence tools, analytical projects, and open data classification initiatives.
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If you use and/or manage a [MISP](https://www.misp-project.org/) instance, the taxonomy integration is seamless. You can choose to use one or more taxonomies, select specific parts (e.g., a single tag from a larger taxonomy), enforce their usage, run analytics on specific tags, or even filter API responses based on selected tags from the taxonomies.
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The [organizational cyber harms taxonomy](https://www.misp-project.org/taxonomies.html#_organizational_cyber_harm) provides a good basis for describing impact on specific events or incidents. This can be used in complement with
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- [economical-impact](https://www.misp-project.org/taxonomies.html#_economical_impact) is a taxonomy designed to describe the financial impact, whether as a positive or negative outcome, on the tagged information (e.g., data exfiltration loss representing a negative impact for the victim but a positive gain for an adversary).
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- [nis2](https://www.misp-project.org/taxonomies.html#_nis2) is a taxonomy that includes impacted sectors, the severity of the impact (which is open to interpretation), and the impact outlook (e.g., whether it is increasing or decreasing over time).
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An overview of the taxonomy as used in MISP:
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My hope is that more organizations will share details about the impacts of their own events, as well as insights from other incidents. I understand this can be challenging, as sharing TTPs of threat actors is currently more widely accepted than sharing details about impacts. However, I truly hope this trend will shift, enabling more robust analytics and a clearer understanding of the actual impact of incidents—whether it is accurately represented or inflated. The formalized [organizational cyber harms taxonomy](https://www.misp-project.org/taxonomies.html#_organizational_cyber_harm) provides a solid foundation for improving the description and analysis of impacts.
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Don't hesitate to propose new taxonomies or suggest improvements via the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/misp/misp-taxonomies).
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# References
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- MISP Taxonomy: [organizational-cyber-harm](https://www.misp-project.org/taxonomies.html#_organizational_cyber_harm) - A taxonomy for classifying organizational cyber harms based on categories such as physical, economic, psychological, reputational, and social/societal impacts in [MISP standard](https://www.misp-standard.org/) format.
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- The [MISP Taxonomies collaborative GitHub repository](https://github.com/misp/misp-taxonomies) allows you to propose changes, updates, or corrections to the directory of taxonomies.
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