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Enriching Attack Trees by Reconstructing the Equifax Data Breach

Morriën, S.L. (2025) Enriching Attack Trees by Reconstructing the Equifax Data Breach.

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Abstract:Attack trees and crime scripts are frequently employed in cybersecurity to analyze vulnerabilities from the perspective of a criminal. However, no development has been made in researching whether these two formalisms can complement each other. We propose that a detailed attack tree can be generated by recreating the steps outlined in a crime script. Our objective is to uncover hidden attack vectors represented as nodes that were not yet in the tree and improve the completeness of the attack tree in terms of the number of nodes (tree depth), using the 2017 Equifax data breach as the main focus. This was done by simulating the Equifax environment on a virtual machine in which a vulnerable version of Apache Struts was running. The attack was then recreated by following the steps of a crime script, and any missing steps were analyzed, along with alternative paths that the attacker could have taken. Based on these results, a detailed attack tree was created that contained the attack in significantly more detail than the initial attack tree created from the crime script and also included alternative paths
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Subject:54 computer science
Programme:Computer Science BSc (56964)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/107288
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