Fending Off Cyberthreats in the Wake of Natural Disasters
Auroop Ganguly, CEE distinguished professor, and director of AI for Climate and Sustainability and co-director of Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute, and his interdisciplinary team, are conducting a U.S. Department of Defense funded study on recovery from disruptions to critical infrastructure, both military and civilian.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cynthia McCormick Hibbert. Main photo: Northeastern researchers are working with defense officials to identify how to recover from compound disasters, such as New Orleans flooding following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Recovery from natural disasters or man-made attacks begins with being prepared, researchers say
It would be bad enough if severe river flooding washed out roads and train tracks leading to a U.S. military installation and interrupted transportation in and around the facility.
What if a foreign adversary took advantage of that natural disaster and launched a cyberattack in the area? How quickly could recovery take place before national security was affected?
This is the sort of scenario Auroop Ganguly, director of AI for Climate and Sustainability and co-director of Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute, and his interdisciplinary team are analyzing for a U.S. Department of Defense-funded study on recovery from disruptions to critical infrastructure, both military and civilian.
Ganguly says the focus is on mapping failure and recovery pathways and adapting to changing conditions, which include more extreme weather events as a result of climate change and evolving security challenges, including terrorism and cyberattacks.
The study will pay particular attention to compounded threats, when the pressure of one disaster is made worse by the co-occurrence of another.
“Recovery has to be efficient and effective. Not like what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Even now, the city is not what it used to be,” Ganguly says.
“Our technology is getting so complicated, if one thing fails in the power grid, it can have cascading effects. That has an impact on transportation, communication and water,” he says.
“We have to make plans in advance for robustness and recovery,” Ganguly says.
Northeastern is the lead researcher on the $3 million, five-year DOD project being conducted in collaboration with the University of California at Berkeley, the Pacific Northwest National Lab, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Naval Research Lab.
The team is using network science and engineering to develop a theoretical framework for recognizing system fragilities and putting recovery processes to work.
Members say the resilience of an installation depends on the interconnected components within the installation as well as the surrounding lifelines and ecosystems that support the installation.
“We’re looking at different vulnerabilities in infrastructure systems,” says Jack Watson, an Ph.D. intern in Ganguly’s lab since 2021, who is currently funded by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a graduate fellow.
Watson’s task is to analyze the resilience of train and subway systems in the Northeast corridor that stretches from Washington to Boston.
“When we talk about compound extremes, we mean a couple of different things,” he says. “If a storm hits a city and causes a huge storm surge at the same time it’s high tide, that damage will be worse than if it wasn’t high tide.”
Read full story at Northeastern Global News