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.

Braess Paradox, and How It Is Impacting Our World

My Connecting Point interview with host Carrie Saldo is now online.

Thanks to PBS affiliate WGBY 57 for giving me the opportunity to discuss the Braess Paradox, and How It Is Impacting Our World.

In the segment, I also speak about the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, the Isenberg School of Management,  and my new course Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare.

It is fascinating to see how networks and paradoxes are now captivating the media and the public.

Thanks also to the producers of America Revealed for letting me be part of the Transportation segment.

What Was in the Heavy Package from China?

Virtual communications are terrific but receiving a heavy package at your door that has traveled thousands of miles and comes as a complete surprise is something special.

Such an experience happened to me yesterday and above is a photograph of the contents of the padded package from China. The inscription reads: PAKDD 2011 With gratitude to Professor Anna Nagurney for her keynote speech at the conference.

How extremely thoughtful of the organizers of the PAKDD2011 Conference in Shenzhen, China to thank a keynote speaker in this way and to take the time and effort to have such a gift produced and mailed!

My keynote speech on Supernetworks: Opportunities and Challenges for Decision-Making in the 21st Century can be viewed (and heard) using different media here and the presentation, in pdf format, can be downloaded here.

As a Finance colleague of mine at the Isenberg School said, before I brought the beautiful engraved crystal creation (see photo above) to my office yesterday, we, in the Western world, should learn how to thank and recognize our speakers as the Chinese do!

Congestion Games, Evolutionary Dynamics, Transportation, and Professor Martin Beckmann

Research that years after publication is still being cited and that gets discovered by different disciplines is research that needs to be celebrated and those behind it recognized. Solid theoretical research, which is implemented in practice, deserves special kudos.

I was incredibly lucky to have had my doctoral dissertation committee at Brown University consist of Professor Stella Dafermos, as the chair, with Professors Martin Beckmann and George Majda. Both Dafermos and Majda died much too young but left amazing scholarly legacies and impacted many students.

Professor Martin Beckmann, the renowned economist and regional scientist, is still with us and his classic book, with McGuire and Winsten, Studies in the Economics of Transportation (1956), continues to inspire both research and practice.

A quote from the Beckmann, McGuire, and Winsten book appears in the first chapter of William Sandholm's recent book, Population Games and Evolutionary Dynamics, MIT Press.

Beckmann's work has stimulated such areas of research as congestion games, evolutionary dynamics, and the development of analytical methodologies from variational inequalities to projected dynamical systems. His research on the rigorous formulation of user-optimized behavior in congested urban transportation networks is applied around the globe.

You can read more about the impact of the Beckmann, McGuire, and Winsten book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, in a retrospective paper that I wrote with David E. Boyce and Hani S. Mahmassani.

Last year, Professor Mahmassani organized the Transportation Network Design and Economics Symposium at Northwestern University in honor of Professor Beckmann and you can view the video of his lecture, my lecture on supply chain network design under oligopolistic competition, and Professor Boyce's fascinating lecture on the history of transportation highway design in Chicago here.

Video of the Traffic Panel at the World Science Festival

A video of the Traffic panel: !@#$% Traffic: From Insects to Interstates that took place at the World Science Festival in NYC last June is now available.

The panel was moderated by Robert Krulwich of NPR and ABC with the panelists that joined me being: Dr. Iain Couzin of Princeton University and Dr. Mitchell Joachim of Columbia University. We were on stage at the Kimmel Center at NYU with over 400 in the audience.

The video is not of the entire panel discussions, and the accompanying Q&A with the audience, which I enjoyed very much, as well, but you can view the segment here and you can get a sense of how fascinating traffic and transportation are! It contains a discussion of the Braess paradox and the closing of Broadway from 47th to 42nd Streets.

You can find other video segments from the World Science Festival (even on Avian Einsteins and Pioneers in Science) on that same link.