The Gibson Index provides a clear and understandable way to rank cyber attacks. Level Zero or Level One events are very minor, whereas Level Six or Level Seven attacks are extremely critical.
Launched in February 2013, the highest-ranked attack to date has been Level Four.
The Gibson Index will bring clarity to the reporting of hacking events and cyber attacks.
It will protect people from being unfairly vilified.
The rules will be managed openly.
Most people don't know the difference between a distributed denial of service attack and a port scan.
Furthermore, when "cyber attack" news spreads, the fear factor gets sensationalized for things that are actually somewhat mundane to those who understand how the Internet works.
This has contributed to a climate of persecution and fear for people who are guilty of nothing more than being inquisitive, creative, and talented with computers.
There is a vast difference between running standard network analysis tools and actively seeking to engage in truly criminal behaviour. In the gray area, unwarranted sensationalism must be fought off with tools like the Gibson Index - educating people about what is mere fooling around, versus what is actually malicious.
The name "Gibson Index" was inspired by both the movie "Hackers" and the works of William Gibson.
The arrangement of the scale was inspired by Japan's Shindo scale for measuring earthquakes - in one incarnation, the scale ranged from Shindo 0 to Shindo 7. Additionally, the Shindo system is rather unique in that it measures the shaking of the event at specific locations (rather than the USGS system which measures the quake itself). So, for example, a quake could be a Shindo 6 in Fukushima, but only a Shindo 2 or 3 in Tokyo.