A Digital Twin to Improve Cyber-Social Impact

Vita Santa Barletta, Danilo Caivano, Gabriel Cellammare, Andrea Dimauro, Pasquale Mesagna +1

The increasing complexity of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and their integration with IT infrastructures has significantly expanded the cyber threat landscape. Traditional cybersecurity models, primarily based on the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA triad), fail to capture the broader societal and operational impacts of cyberattacks. This paper proposes a novel framework that integrates Digital Twin technology with a Cyber-Social Security model to simulate, analyze, and quantify cyber threats in critical infrastructures. Virtualized ICS environments built with Mininet and MiniCPS are used to model attack scenarios and assess their consequences across technical and social dimensions. At the core of the framework lies the Cyber-Social Vulnerability Scoring System (CSVSS), a quantitative metric that extends CVSS with a Social Impact dimension grounded in the Entity and Place pillars, producing a single, reproducible severity score that reflects real-world consequences. Crucially, the framework does not automate risk assessment but keeps the human analyst at its center: a Large Language Model (LLM) performs a first-pass analysis, mapping vulnerabilities and…