Jack pandemus – Cyber incident and emergency response during a pandemic

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 quickly gave rise to a newly expansive space wrought with unforeseen vulnerabilities. Cyber threat actors swiftly identified this space and immediately began seizing targets of opportunity amid chaotic conditions. Recognizing this emerging challenge, our goal was to find a mechanism that would support better understanding of holistic cyber incident response in the context of emergency management amid pandemic circumstances. Therefore, we conducted Jack Pandemus, a distributed event that simulated concurrent cyber and emergency incident response challenges. This event first occurred with Charleston, South Carolina followed by Savannah, Georgia. Each iteration included public and private sector entities whose positions corresponded with real-world cyber incident and/or emergency response. Jack Pandemus introduced a cascading multisector cyber incident under pandemic conditions with a focus on identifying cross-sector gaps, dependencies, constraints, strengths, and lessons learned. Jack Pandemus ultimately revealed: that physical pandemic stressors can significantly impact cyber incident response; that emergency response remains primarily focused on pandemic impacts despite concurrent cyber consequences; that locally shared resources are quickly exhausted during a multisector crisis; that significant confusion remains between public and private sectors regarding how and when to request additional support; and that cybersecurity is not treated as an operational problem despite considerable cascading potential.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical infrastructure
• key resources
• cyber resilience
• incident response
• emergency response simulation exercise
• table-top exercise
• whole of community
• bottom-up approach

Acknowledgments

The ACI would like to acknowledge the cities of Savannah and Charleston, states of South Carolina and Georgia, as well as Idaho National Laboratory and the Norwich University Applied Research Institutes for all their support in making Jack Pandemus a successful event.

Data Availability Statement:

Data requests can be submitted to the Army Cyber Institute at [email protected]

Notes

1. However, a US study failed to find a similar effect in their sample of participants (Hawdon et al., 2020). Their COVID vs. pre-COVID participants differed in their cyber defense savvy, with more COVID participants using anti-virus software which may have interfered with finding an effect.

2. Whole of community approach is defined as a robust collective effort to identify interdependencies amongst government, industry, and critical infrastructure stakeholders to increase resiliency and mitigate impacts of a cascading incident; these efforts begin at the lowest level with owners and operators before moving to higher echelon decision-makers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erik B. Korn

Mr. Erik Korn is a U.S. Army Cyber Officer who previously served as a Critical Infrastructure Key Resources (CIKR) Team Research Scientist at the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) where he led the Jack Voltaic Data Collection and Analysis team. Erik attained a B.S. in Comparative Politics from USMA in 2009, and an M.P.A. from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in 2018. MAJ Korn has previously served in a variety of operational Military Intelligence (MI) and Cyber assignments, including Brigade Collection Manager, ISR Platoon Leader, MI Company Executive Officer, Cyber Mission Commander, and Cyber Company Commander. Erik also previously served as an Assistant Professor and Course Director for the United States Military Academy (USMA) Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) IT460 Cyber Policy, Strategy, and Operations course.

Dr. Douglas Fletcher is a U.S. Army Operations Research Systems Analyst Officer currently serving as a member of the ORSA Committee in the Army Logistics University at Fort Lee, Virginia. LTC Fletcher attained a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the United States Military Academy in 1997, and an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from the Naval Postgraduate School in 2007, and his Ph.D. in Statistics from Temple University in 2019. He was the former project lead for Jack Voltaic 3.0, a research event into how cyberattacks against commercial critical infrastructure impact Army force projection. Doug’s current research interests include exercise design, statistical learning, and generalized linear modeling.

Dr. Erica Mitchell formerly served as the Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR) Research Group Chief for the Army Cyber Institute and Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point. She graduated from West Point with a B.S. in American Legal Systems, was commissioned as a Signal Corps Officer, and later transitioned to an Information Systems Management Officer (FA26B). She earned an M.S. in Information Systems Management, C.A.S. in Information Security Management, and Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology from Syracuse University. LTC Mitchell’s military service includes serving at increasing levels of responsibility, starting at the tactical level as a platoon leader, up to and including project management on DoD-level enterprise technology programs. Her main research focus at ACI was critical infrastructure resilience.

Dr. Aryn Pyke is a Cognitive Scientist and Computer Engineer doing research on human aspects of cybersecurity with the Army Cyber Institute. Her recent research areas include raising cyber situational awareness, improving the usability of cybersecurity procedures and tools, and improving cyber security training/education/assessment. She is also an Associate Professor of Engineering Psychology (Human-Computer Interaction and Human Factors) at the United States Military Academy (West Point).

Mr. Steven Whitham is a Cyber Warfare Officer serving as a Research Scientist at the Army Cyber Institute. MAJ Whitham graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2009 and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2018. He is currently the lead scenario designer for the Jack Voltaic research project. His research areas of interest include machine learning, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and exercise design.