Modeling and Simulating large scale Cyber Effects for Cybersecurity using Riverbed Modeler

Organizations have moved towards service based architectures and applications are hosted in the Clouds. An interruption in online delivery of such services is of grave concern to the organizations as it causes problems to a large number of users. The identification of the security vulnerability in these systems which can be exploited by cybercriminals is of utmost importance when developing an architecture for online hosting of applications. Defensive capabilities to thwart the cybercriminals must be deployed. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is commonly employed to create panic and prevent the delivery of services to legitimate users. This paper presents the use of network security simulation and modeling for understanding the effect of cyberattacks such as DDoS on a system. Experimentations conducted include deployment of services such as FTP, Email, and HTTP in a simulated environment. The main aim is to simulate network infrastructure and security policies before online deployment of the services. As these services will be used by a large number of users concurrently, it would be important to create a resilient system against modern DDoS attacks. The observations from the simulations will allow to share and expand the knowledge of the users for development of secure systems.