Person

# Biography

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Michael Siegel is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is currently the Co-Director of the PROductivity from Information Technology (PROFIT) Project.  Siegel’s research interests include the integration and use of information from multiple and the use of modeling and data analytics to analyze complex systems.

His work has been published in areas including the use of information technology in financial risk management and global financial systems, cybersecurity, applications of computation social science to analyze state stability, digital business, financial account aggregation, healthcare information systems, heterogeneous database systems, managing data semantics, query optimization, intelligent database systems, and learning in database systems.

He received his BS in engineering from Trinity College (1977), an MS in engineering from the Solar Energy Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1980), and an MA and PhD in computer science from Boston University (1989).

Biography

Michael Siegel

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

We developed a simulation game to study the effectiveness of decision-makers in overcoming two complexities in building cybersecurity capabilities: potential delays in capability development; and uncertainties in predicting cyber incidents. Analyzing 1479 simulation runs, we compared the performances of a group of experienced professionals with those of an inexperienced control group. Experienced subjects did not understand the mechanisms of delays any better than in- experienced subjects; however, experienced subjects were better able to learn the need for proactive decision-making through an iterative process. Both groups exhibited similar errors when dealing with the uncertainty of cyber incidents. Our findings highlight the importance of training for decision-makers with a focus on systems thinking skills, and lay the groundwork for future research on uncovering mental biases about the complexities of cybersecurity.

Decision Making and Biases in Cybersecurity Capability Development: Evidence from a Simulation Game Experiment

Smart city IoT is responsible for communicating system-critical data about urban infrastructure that keeps our modern cities functioning. Today, IoT devices lack commu- nication protocols with data integrity as a priority. Without data integrity, smart city infrastructure is at risk of actuating urban environments on compromised data. Attackers can use this IoT communication flaw to wage cyber-physical attacks on Smart Cities. We designed and developed an integrity-first communication protocol for IoT that is distributed and scalable based on the Ethereum blockchain. Our light client ensures data communication integrity for systems that require it most.

A Smart IoT Integrity – First Communication Protocol via an Ethereum Blockchain Light Client

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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

Develop software that helps secure industrial control systems by leveraging our Ethereum light client to address industrial IoT security challenges.