Cyber Risk Index: a Socio-Technical Composite Index for Assessing Risk of Cyber Attacks with Negative Outcome

Information and Communication Technologies has become a key-part of our life and transformed every aspect of it, from business to politics. Cybersecurity policy making has been a topic of interest in the last decade and the scientific community identified best practices, frameworks and metrics but no index in the literature has ever measured cyber security as a multidimensional phenomenon considering both cyber threats and readiness of countries. The aim of this paper is to propose a composite index for assessing cyber risk and secondly to investigate which socio-economic factors influence the index itself. The Cyber Risk Index showed good robustness and provided information on both the current cyber risk situation in the world and the socio-economic factors contributing to its increase. The results showed that the level of cyber risk is mainly influenced by four socio-economic factors: human development index, GDP, democracy and peace, suggesting that both the geopolitical and the socio-economic scenario play a key role.