Scott D. Applegate

Lieutenant Colonel Scott D. Applegate is a United States Army Information Systems Management Officer with more than 21 years of leadership, management, communications and security experience. LTC Applegate holds two Masters Degrees, one in Military Studies and one in Information Technology and Assurance, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Information Technology with a focus on Cyber Conflict at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His current research interests include cyber conflict, cyber militias, security metrics, cyber security policy, information assurance and cyber law. LTC Applegate currently resides in Northern Virginia with his wife Sara and their two children.

Towards a Cyber Conflict Taxonomy
Co-author: Angelos Stavrou (George Mason University)
This paper seeks to create a practical taxonomy to describe cyber conflict events and the actors involved in them in a manner that is useful to security practitioners and researchers working in the domain of cyber operations. The proposed Cyber Conflict Taxonomy is an extensible network taxonomy organized as a plex data structure.  Subjects of the taxonomy are entered as either Events or Entities and are then categorized using the categories and subcategories of Actions or Actors. Each of these categories is further subdivided into increasingly specific subcategories used to describe the defining characteristics of each subject and labeled lateral linkages are used to illustrate the associative relationships between Entities and Events. The categories are organized in both a hierarchical and associative manner to illustrate the relationships between subjects and categories. A prototype of this taxonomy was developed and tested using a test set of recent cyber conflict events and used to explore the relationship and connections between these events and the states, groups or individuals that participated in them. Furthermore, this taxonomy can potentially identify actors across different events based on their similar method of operation, toolsets and target

The Dawn of Kinetic Cyber
Cyber attacks are often called non-violent or non-kinetic attacks, but the simple truth is that there is a credible capability to use cyber attacks to achieve kinetic effects. Kinetic Cyber refers to a class of cyber attacks that can cause direct or indirect physical damage, injury or death solely though the exploitation of vulnerable information systems and processes. Kinetic cyber attacks are a real and growing threat that is generally being ignored as unrealistic or alarmist. These types of attacks have been validated experimentally in the laboratory environment, they have been used operationally in the context of espionage and sabotage, and they have been used criminally in a number of attacks throughout the world. While these types of attacks have thus far been statistically insignificant, the rapid growth and integration of cyber physical systems into everything from automobiles to SCADA systems implies a significant kinetic cyber threat in the near future. It is imperative that the security community begin to take these types of threats seriously and address vulnerabilities associated with cyber physical systems and other devices that could be utilized to cause kinetic effects through cyber attacks.

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