Providing a rational conceptual model for classifying critical infrastructure cyber threats

The Development of communication infrastructures and connection of Heterogeneous networks with concurrent expansion of diverse services at national and local organizations beside of it's Unusual and intertwined structure are main reason for growing of vulnerabilities and threats in cyberspace. Cyber threats with effectiveness at national level against some of these infrastructures -as known critical infrastructures- impose huge and Irrecoverable costs on the organizations, societies and countries. The main action in dealing with these cases is to identify the above threats. The purpose of this study is to analyze these threats in the form of a rational conceptual model for their classification. Achieving this goal requires identifying cyber threat classifications, examining their rationale and typology at critical infrastructure level. In this study, by conducting relevant researches, reviewing the literatures, identifying frequent cyber threats, validating them from credible sources, and extracting common concepts related to cyber threat identification, dimensions, components and indicators of cyber threat classification of critical infrastructures were extracted. The data were collected by Meta-synthesis and the results were validated by Kappa coefficient. The results came in the form of a rational conceptual model of cyber threat classification of critical infrastructures whose six dimensions are: threats, threat factors, threat characteristics, intrusive view, system description, and threat identification resources.