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Estimating the Cost of Cybersecurity Activities with CAsPeA: A Case Study and Comparative Analysis

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Information Systems Security (ICISS 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12553))

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Abstract

Contemporary approaches to the estimation of cybersecurity costs in organisations tend to focus on the cost of incidents or technological investments. However, there are other, less transparent costs related to cybersecurity management that need to be properly recognised in order to get a complete picture. These costs are associated with everyday activities and the time spent by employees on cybersecurity-related actions. Such costs constitute a substantial component of cybersecurity expenditures, but because they become evident only during scrupulous analyses, often they are neglected. This paper presents new developments on CAsPeA – a method which enables estimating the cost of these activities based on a model derived from the Activity-Based Costing (ABC) and the NIST SP 800-53 guidelines. The application of the method is illustrated by a case study of a civil engineering enterprise. The method’s evaluation based on comparative analysis in respect to SQUARE is described.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The study covered 355 organisations worldwide from various economic sectors.

  2. 2.

    Available at http://www.wynagrodzenia.pl/. Last access: 10.10.2020.

  3. 3.

    Source: www.exchangerates.org.uk/USD-EUR-exchange-rate-history.html. Last access: 10.10.2020.

  4. 4.

    Available at http://www.wynagrodzenia.pl/.

  5. 5.

    The values were converted to US dollars (USD) from Polish Złoty with a rounded average exchange rate equal to 4. Roughly, the rate can be also used to interpret the values in Euro.

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Leszczyna, R., Litwin, A. (2020). Estimating the Cost of Cybersecurity Activities with CAsPeA: A Case Study and Comparative Analysis. In: Kanhere, S., Patil, V.T., Sural, S., Gaur, M.S. (eds) Information Systems Security. ICISS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12553. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65610-2_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65610-2_17

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