Present-Day Cybersecurity: Actual Challenges and Solution Directions

Currently available cyberspace services offer all kinds of possibilities for individuals, businesses, and organizations to arrange their lives and to improve their e-enabled business processes. However, next to the numerous benefits, we are aware of many less desirable developments in cyberspace. In other words, the security of cyberspace (i.e., cybersecurity) is at stake, and we have to act in this (relatively new) domain. In this chapter, we first provide a condensed overview of existing and upcoming cyber activities and cyber processes in various cyber subdomains, hereby using the terminology of a holistic cyberspace model. We also introduce a general cyber risk management model. Next, we present an overview of a series of (mostly) recent cyber incidents, based on which we formulate related cybersecurity challenges. In order to understand how we currently deal with these challenges, we then describe the current efforts of various cyberspace actors to enhance cybersecurity to a sufficient resilience level and evaluate the limitations of their endeavors. By putting together all findings, we draw our conclusions in an overview of actual cybersecurity solution directions, that is, an overview of the efforts needed to bring the security in all cyberspace subdomains at acceptable levels.