Cybersecurity Research and the Isenberg School of Management

There is tremendous interest in cybersecurity issues at UMass as well as at the Isenberg School of Management.

For example, on December 2, 2014, there will be a Cybersecurity Network Workforce Summit taking place at UMass Boston with participation from the UMass system President Dr. Robert Caret and the UMass Amherst Chancellor Dr. Kumble Subbaswamy.

And, just this past September, along with my Isenberg School of Management colleagues, Professor Mila Sherman of Finance and Professor Senay Solak of my Operations and Information Management Department, we, together with Professor Wayne Burleson of ECE, organized, with help from Professor Andrew Lo of the Sloan School, a very successful cybersecurity workshop at MIT. This workshop was supported by the second grant that we had received from the Advanced Cuber Security Center (ACSC).

I have posted all the presentations from our Workshop here.

Since our workshop at MIT, my OIM colleague, Professor Ryan Wright, received an NSF grant, joint with his University of Oklahoma colleagues, entitled, Building the Human Firewall. Plus, we heard that one of our Management Science doctoral students, Yueran Zhuo, who is being supervised by Solak, had her poster, titled "Optimizing Cybersecurity Investments with Risk: Insights for Resource Allocation" tie for second place as voted by ACSC Annual Conference attendees as a Best Cyber Security Solution for 2014.  The $1,000 prize will be shared with the other second place winner "Authentication Using Embedded Logical Queries."

There is a lot of excitement on the UMass Amherst campus surrounding the possibility of a Cybersecurity Institute that would be across colleges and schools, which is terrific. 

My interests and research in cybersecurity center around the network economics of cyber crime and cybersecurity with additional foci on risk management, information asymmetry, information sharing and security investments, Internet vulnerability and resilience,  as well as supply chain aspects of security and vulnerability due, for example, to outsourcing. My latest paper on the theme is  A Multiproduct Network Economic Model of Cybercrime in Financial Services.

A video of my presentation on cybercrime and financial service organizations filmed at the INNFORMS Minnepolis conference can be viewed here.