Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enteprise Security - Great Presentations Now Online!

I would like to thank the Advanced Cyber Secuity Center (ACSC) for funding the second phase of our project at UMass Amherst, which focused on Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enterprise Security.

As part of the project, with Co-PIs Professor Mila Sherman and Senay Solak of the Isenberg School of Management and Professor Wayne Burleson of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, we organized a workshop at the MIT Sloan School on September 19, 2014. I had blogged about the workshop and am delighted that the ACSC has now made all of our presentations online so that you can read and reflect at your leisure!

The full agenda is here.  I have posted the first page of each presentation below along with the link to the presentation in the order of presentations, so enjoy. Cybersecurity is not only a topic filled with  fascinating research questions but also one of great practical importance for businesses and organization and their very security.

Link to Guenther's presentation.

Link to Burleson's presentation.

Link to Clark's presentation.

Link to my presentation.

Link to Devadas' presentation which was part of a panel.

Link to Lo's presentation.

Link to Getmansky Sherman's presentation.

Link to Solak's presentation.

Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enterprise Risk Security - Photos from a Fabulous Workshop

Yesterday, we held our Workshop on Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enterprise Security, at MIT's Sloan School.

The event was sponsored through a grant that we received from the Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC): Professors Wayne Burleson of the College of Engineering, Mila Sherman of the Finance Department, and Senay Solak, and I of the Department of Operations and Information Management at UMass Amherst.

The workshop was fabulous with panelists and participants from the ACSC, academia, industry, and government. 

The Isenberg School posted a nice news release on our workshop.

Below, I capture some of the highlights through photos of the speakers, panelists, and venue.

Great to see my NSF project collaborator and PI, Associate Dean Professor Tilman Wolf, with a doctoral student that we are working with. (The commute from Amherst to Cambridge took us separately 3 hours.)

William Guenther, Chairman, CEO & Founder of Mass Insight, opening up the workshop

 

Charles Benway, Executive Director of ACSC, and Professor Wayne Burleson giving their Opening Remarks

The one and only Dr. David Clark, who is an Internet legend, thought-leader, and visionary, and Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, giving his keynote: The Foundations of Poor Cybersecurity, and with fans afterwards

I followed with my talk on Network Science and Economics, which can be downloaded, in its entirety, here.

During the breaks and lunch there were opportunities for further discussions

The Cybersecurity panelists sharing their insights with us

The one and only Professor Andrew Lo of the Sloan School giving his keynote during the lunch

 My great colleague and workshop co-organizer, Professor Mila Sherman

   The Risk panelists

My Operations and Information Management colleague, Professor Senay Solak, getting ready to give his great talk

The panelists on the Modeling and Optimization: Making Better Decisions for Cybersecurity panel that Senay and I moderated

The audience, venue. and our MIT technician (for some reason my talk would not project at first, and it is in pdf style, but we used a backup computer, and the show went on!)

And, as "icing on the cake," I got to meet a Wharton PhD, whose dissertation advisor was Dr. Pat Harker, then the Dean of Wharton. Pat is now the President of the University of Delaware. Her dissertation was on stochastic variational inequalities, so it was extra special to be able to talk with her!

Many excellent research questions were generated and I hope that the great momentum established continues given the importance of the issues raised and discussed!

In order to address the cybersecurity challenges we need private - public partnerships with academia, industry, and government,  such as the one that ACSC is building.

Thanks to everyone for such a rewarding day professionally and intellectually!

FireEye Acquires Mandiant and Why Cybersecurity Matters

My most recent post on this blog was on networks in mergers and acquisitions and shortly thereafter there was a very interesting acquisition announcement in the cybersecurity space: FireEye acquired Mandiant Corp. This is considered one of the biggest recent security deals as reported by The New York Times, which noted that The combination of the two companies — one that detects attacks in a novel way (FireEye), another that responds to attacks (Mandiant) — comes as corporate America has become wary of relying on the federal government to monitor the Internet and warn of incoming attacks. And according to The Wall Street Journal: Mandiant and FireEye market themselves to businesses, not consumers, and focus on blocking highly skilled hackers who can evade traditional antivirus software. But they have unique specialties. Mandiant has become famous for its investigators that act like a cyber-SWAT team for companies that have been hacked. They focus on figuring out how hackers got in and removing them from corporate systems.

Mandiant is named after its founder, Kevin Mandia, who also served as the company's CEO prior to its acquisition. According to the company's website: Mandia was profiled on the cover of Fortune magazine and recognized by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the 100 leading global thinkers of 2013. The New York Times a few months ago had major coverage of the expertise of Mandiant which was fascinating.

Mr. Mandia went to Lafayette College, in Easton, PA, which is also my husband's undergraduate alma mater. From  an article on Lafayette College's website, I learned that Kevin Mandia was a computer science graduate, and also holds a Master’s in forensic science from George Washington University. He is co-author of Incident Response: Investigating Computer Crime and articles for The International Journal of Cyber Crime.

I became interested in cybersecurity and cyber crime in my research on modeling the Internet and was involved in an Advanced Cyber Security  Center (ACSC) project, Prime the Pump, entitled: Cybersecurity Risk Analysis and Investment Optimization  with colleagues in Operations & Information Management and in Finance at the Isenberg School of Management, and in Electrical and Computer Engineering, at UMass Amherst, along with one of the university's chief information officers.

I presented some of our funded research at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Minneapolis last October and posted some information prior to the conference. Our session, organized by Professor Alla Kammerdiner,  was entitled: Big Data Analytics for Cybersecurity, and it was videotaped. INFORMS recently posted the video of my presentation: Network Economics of Cyber Crime with Applications to Financial Service Organizations  on INFORMS' great youtube channel and it can be accessed directly below.

We hope to extend this and related work through the auspices of ACSC.

Also,  Alla's presentation was on Network Inference for Monitoring Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) and it can be viewed below.

Alla ran the Boston Marathon last April 15 and is an elite runner. She heard about the bombings after she completed the marathon route and while on the Green line traveling back to her hotel.