Events
Maryland Applied Graduate Engineering (MAGE) Webinar
Event Start Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - 12:00 pm
Event End Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - 1:00 pm
Location: Virtual
Strategic Cyber Risk in Complex Systems: Understanding the US Air Transportation Sector
Dr. Charles Harry
Director of Operations
Maryland Global Initiative in Cybersecurity (MaGIC)
U.S. policy makers have increasingly coalesced around the need to develop a risk based approach for addressing the strategic effects of some cyber attacks. Both U.S. Cyber Strategy and the recently released Solarium Commission Report identify the need to assess and manage national risk. This webinar will discuss a new approach to assess strategic cyber risk by applying graph analysis and complex adaptive systems models to assess both the capacity and the propagation delay in the U.S. domestic air infrastructure. Leveraging 2019 data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, we explore national and regional effects stemming from a series of hypothetical cyber attacks against both airport infrastructure and airline networks. Results from this analysis indicate that strategic effects are highly influenced by air network structure and identify areas of regional risk that might require additional attention by federal and state agencies who are charged with assessing and managing strategic impacts of cyber attacks.