  With the development of incipient technologies, user devices becoming more
exposed and ill-used by foes. In upcoming decades, traditional security
measures will not be sufficient enough to handle this huge threat towards
distributed hardware and software. Lack of standard network attack taxonomy has
become an indispensable dispute on developing a clear understanding about the
attacks in order to have an operative protection mechanism. Present attack
categorization techniques protect a specific group of threat which has either
messed the entire taxonomy structure or ambiguous when one network attacks get
blended with few others attacks. Hence, this raises concerns about developing a
common and general purpose taxonomy. In this study, a sequential
question-answer based model of categorization is proposed. In this article, an
intrusion detection framework and threat grouping schema are proposed on the
basis of four sequential questions (Who, Where, How and What). We have used our
method for classifying traditional network attacks in order to identify
initiator, source, attack style and seriousness of an attack. Another focus of
the paper is to provide a preventive list of actions for network administrator
as a guideline to reduce overall attack consequence. Recommended taxonomy is
designed to detect common attacks rather than any particular type of attack
which can have a practical effect in real life attack classification. From the
analysis of the classifications obtained from few infamous attacks, it is
obvious that the proposed system holds certain benefits related to the
prevailing taxonomies. Future research directions have also been well
acknowledged.
