Cyber Weapons as Components of Weapon Systems

The authors propose a novel decomposition of a cyber weapon into cooperating modules, discussing how each module influences the weapon features. Next, the authors examine the adoption of an attack infrastructure to mitigate the weaknesses of these weapons as identified in the literature. Such an attack infrastructure supports the coordination and updating of weapon modules both during their propagation toward targets and after deployment on those targets. The use of this infrastructure parallels that of conventional physical weapons and is corroborated by the evolution of malware and rootkits in the criminal domain.