Markov Models of Cyber Kill Chains with Iterations

A understanding of the nature of targeted cyber-attack processes is needed to defend against this kind of cyber threats. Generally, the models describing processes of targeted cyber attacks are called in the literature as cyber kill chains or rarely cyber-attacks life cycles. Despite the fact that cyber-attacks have random nature, almost no stochastic models of cyber kill chains bases on the theory of stochastic processes have been proposed so far. This work, attempting to fill this deficiency, proposes to start using Markov processes for modeling some cyber-attack kill chains. In this paper two example theoretical models of cycles of returning cyber-attacks are proposed which have been generally named as the models of cyber kill chains with iterations. Presented models are based on homogeneous continuous time Markov chains.