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Keman Huang

Develop a scenario-based simulator that assists energy delivery system operators during a cyber attack to avert unintended consequences.

Scenario-Based Simulator for Operational Resilience During a Cyber Attack

Organizations are vulnerable to cyber-attacks partially because people in the organization are unaware of or unprepared for cyber risks. Building a culture of cybersecurity where the values, attitudes, and beliefs align with organizational goals of cyber resilience is of significant interest to managers and leaders in charge of cybersecurity in organizations today.
This research aims to provide practical tools for cybersecurity leaders to evaluate and improve the maturity of their organizational cybersecurity culture. This organizational cybersecurity culture model, named OCCM, is based on a systematic literature review, case studies, and workshop discussions. More specifically, to go beyond a literature review to identify the related components of organizational cybersecurity culture, we collected information through surveying individuals with knowledge of cyber practices in their companies, semi-structured interviews with willing participants, and voluntary workshop to discuss practices.
This survey was developed by Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS) at MIT’s Sloan School of Management to verify the developed model and explore cybersecurity culture across organizations within different industries.
From June to December 2018, this project surveyed 187 individuals from 11 industries and 18 countries.

Building a Model of Cybersecurity Culture: Survey Results

Issues of international trade policy have recently gained increased attention. Of course, restrictions on international trade regarding technology have long existed – on imports and exports, as well as on direct foreign investment in the United States. But cybersecurity has not been a key issue for trade policy – until now. This is because of the wide adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs), like the Internet-of-Things (IoT), cloud computing, and big data analysis in the digital society. Almost every product is (or can be) Internet connected, including the critical infrastructures which military security, economic security and culture security heavily rely on. Hence cybersecurity has increasingly been invoked as a perspective of “national security,” which has been considered an important factor that impacts international trade and investment policy (Friedman, 2013; Kshetri, 2016; Mata, 2015)^[ Much research suggested that national security issues can significantly impact international trade and foreign direct investment policy. Please refer to the following literature for more details: (Friedman, 2013; Kshetri, 2016; Mata, 2015) ].

Framework for Understanding Cybersecurity Impacts on Digital Trade

With cyberattacks increasingly threatening businesses, executives need new tools, techniques, and approaches to protect their organizations. Unfortunately, criminal innovation often outpaces their defensive efforts. In April 2019, the AV-Test Institute, a research organization that focuses on IT security, registered more than 350,000 new malware samples per day, and according to Symantec’s 2019 Internet Security Threat Report, cyberattacks targeting supply chain vulnerabilities increased by 78% in 2018.1
Wide-scale attacks are becoming more common, too. In October 2016, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that hit Dyn, a domain name system (DNS) provider, in turn brought down companies such as PayPal, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify.2 In 2017, the WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware attacks affected health care, education, manufacturing, and other sectors around the world. A report from the Department of Health in the U.K. revealed that WannaCry cost it 92 million pounds.3 That same year, while the cyber-defense community was working out how to fight ransomware, cryptojacking — the hijacking of other people’s machines to mine cryptocurrency — arose as a threat. Cryptojacking attacks detected by Symantec increased by 8,500% during 2017.4 During 2018, the value of cryptocurrencies plunged 90%, yet Symantec still blocked four times as many cryptojacking attacks as the previous year.5

Casting the Dark Web In a New Light

Companies do not want to do business with suppliers who might cause a cyber breach. Those who are able to show they are more secure than their competitors just might have a competitive advantage.

Keman Huang

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