Risk Countermeasures Based on Five Whys Analysis Considering Offensive Security

As digital transformation progresses, security incidents are becoming more sophisticated and more numerous. In general, it is not clear who the attackers are or what their motives may be. In such a situation, the defender is at a keen disadvantage because the only thing to do is simply take countermeasures to protect itself. The concept of "offensive security" has emerged as a way to overcome the attacker's advantage. This approach takes on the attacker's thought processes and other factors and predicts what methods and technologies would be most advantageous to it. Developing countermeasures in advance based on the concept of offensive security thus enables risk countermeasures to be incorporated in advance. At present, specific countermeasures based on the concept of offensive security have yet to be sufficiently studied. We therefore developed a new risk countermeasure utilizing the concept of offensive security based on the attacker's point of view. Specifically, we identified common factors by extracting the "factors behind" 20 types of cyber-attacks—including targeted attacks, which are cyber-attacks that have a major impact on today's society—using a "five whys" analysis. We then utilized the results as a basis for creating risk countermeasures and clarified their effectiveness through qualitative evaluation.