AVOIDIT: A Cyber Attack Taxonomy

Cyber attacks have greatly increased over the years, where the attackers have progressively improved in devising attacks towards a specific target. To aid in identifying and defending against cyber attacks we propose a cyber attack taxonomy called AVOIDIT (Attack Vector, Operational Impact, Defense, Information Impact, and Target). We use five major classifiers to characterize the nature of an attack, which are classification by attack vector, classification by attack target, classification by operational impact, classification by informational impact, and classification by defense. Our fifth category, classification by defense, is used to provide the network administrator with information of how to mitigate or remediate an attack. Contrary to the existing taxonomies, our taxonomy efficiently classifies blended attacks. Our taxonomy is applied using an application approach with pabulum to educate the defender on possible cyber attacks.