Predicting Terrorism: Calling Miss Cleo
When regular folks want to sneak a peek at what the future holds, they cough up $2 a minute for a call to the psychic hotline. But what's a government to do when it wants to suss out information on the next wave of terrorist attacks?
By Paul Roberts
February 01, 2004 — CSO — When regular folks want to sneak a peek at what the future holds, they cough up $2 a minute for a call to the psychic hotline. But what's a government to do when it wants to suss out information on the next wave of terrorist attacks?
Top researchers at the University of Southern California are trying to find ways to answer the questions that keep government officials up at night. Will terrorists strike again? And if so, where? Will they use traditional, smaller explosives or weapons of mass destruction? Using a three-year, $12 million grant from the DHS, USC will establish the Homeland Security Center of Excellence to study risk analysis related to terrorist threats and the economic consequences of terrorist attacks.
The Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events will be staffed by risk analysts and other experts from USC's schools of policy, planning and development, and engineering, along with faculty from other universities, according to Detlof von Winterfeldt, deputy dean of USC's school of policy, planning and development.
Their combined goal will be to develop new ways of assessing the likelihood of potential terrorist attacks by weighing the vulnerabilities of potential targets and the likely effects of attacks on those targets. The program is a way for the DHS to sponsor multidisciplinary research in areas vital to domestic security, such as agricultural terrorism, cyberterrorism, and chemical, biological and nuclear terrorism.
While governments and private companies have researched the likelihood of attacks on specific targets, such as nuclear reactors, very little work has been done to analyze terrorist risk across a broad spectrum of targets. Researchers at USC will work to develop models that can predict attacks based on factors such as the motivations and capabilities of terrorist groups and the availability of probable targets.
Researchers will also analyze direct and indirect effects of a terrorist attack. For example, researchers studying a dirty bomb explosion will determine how to calculate short- and long-term costs of the explosion.
The center hopes its work will help anticipate and prevent future attacks.
Read more about critical infrastructure in CSOonline's Critical Infrastructure section.
Other stories by Paul Roberts
ESSENTIAL READING
- The CISO's Survival Guide to Securing Data
- Data Privacy and Protection in Production Environments: New Research from Ponemon Institute
- FireEye Advanced Threat Protection KnowledgeVault
- Five Tips to Consider in a Data Security Strategy for Smartphones and Tablets
- Moving Your Email to the Trusted Cloud
- Comprehensive Server Protection
- Cloud Computing in the Midmarket: Assessing the Options
- Farmers Triples Email Usage and Meets FINRA Requirements with Integrated Messaging Solution
- Secunia Yearly Report: The evolution of software security from a global enterprise and end-point perspective
- Aberdeen Report: To Patch, or Not to Patch? (Not If, But How)
- Empowering Your Mobile Workers
- Best Practices for Active Directory Administration
- Busted: When security tools fail
This is a sequel to this morning's post about all operating systems, browsers etc. being vulnerable. A reader correctly noted that I forgot to mention that just about all the security tools out there are flawed, too. The exchange on Twitter went down like this: - Hey Linux, Mac and Windows users: It's ALL vulnerable
- Howard Schmidt went the distance
More Salted Hash with Bill Brenner
