The Nature and the Evolving Trends of the Cyber Threat and of the Vulnerabilities of the National ICT Infrastructures The intrinsic nature of the cyber threat, therefore, limits the scope of deterrence, favors the attack over defence, and requires that all major stakeholders, both public and private, implement a continuous process of analysis so as to be able to update their security standards and procedures to the evolving operational and technical circumstances. computing, makes cyber attack potentially very lucrative while being relatively risk-free for the attacker. It is therefore no surprise that the economic impact of cybercrime is quite worrisome. This is especially true for countries like Italy, for which the theft of the original scientific, technological and companies’ know-how is a direct damage to their existing comparative advantage, undermining their competitiveness in the global markets. Computer crime is a growing concern also because its illicit profits are often re-invested in the search of new system’s vulnerabilities and in the development of more sophisticated, efficient and easyto-use offensive capabilities, making cybercrime a threat of primary importance for the stability, the prosperity and the security of the country. Classification of the threat Depending on the actors involved and the goals pursued, it is possible to distinguish four kinds of threats: • Cybercrime: all malicious activities with a criminal intent carried out in cyberspace, such as swindles or internet fraud, identity theft, stealing of data or of intellectual property; • Cyber espionage: improper acquisition of confidential or classified data, not necessarily of economic or commercial value; terrorism: ideologically • Cyber motivated exploitations of systems’ vulnerabilities with the intent of influencing a state or an international organization; warfare: activities and • Cyber operations carried out in the cyber domain with the purpose of achieving an operational advantage of military significance. The computer crime market The computer crime market represents therefore a very palatable and profitable sector for autonomous hackers and for criminal organizations alike. They both bolster a black market in which it is possible to trade illegal contents (such as drugs, child pornography or copyrighted material) and to sell ready-to-use toolkits for conducting all kind of attacks and exploitations to the computer systems of choice, either independently or with the technical support of criminal organizations. This, in turn, multiplies the opportunities for felonies against assets (such as swindles, blackmail, extortions, thefts, etc.), misappropriation of confidential information and identity The economic impact of cybercrime The ever-increasing volume of companies’ data and personal assets information stored in cyberspace, recently encouraged by the growing resort to cloud 13