Diesner organizes international meeting on cybersecurity

If, on a typical day, you make a financial transaction online, attend a doctor’s appointment, or go to the airport for a flight, a plethora of cybersecurity issues can impact your routines in undesirable ways—all before lunch. When considered on a global scale, the number of potential security issues facilitated by information and communication technologies becomes even more significant.

“These issues can impact many aspects of our public and private lives, from a person’s presence on the web to their economic transactions to the safety of public infrastructures,” said GSLIS Assistant Professor Jana Diesner.

To address some of these issues, Diesner organized a one-day meeting where a cybersecurity group from the German Armed Forces joined academics and representatives from federal and corporate organizations in Chicago in June 2012.

“This meeting brought together people from the armed forces, industry, and academia. This diversity of backgrounds allowed us to address cybersecurity from different perspectives,” Diesner said.

Discussions at the meeting covered core topics and current issues in cybersecurity, presented by experts on technical as well as social aspects of the subject. “For example, we talked about the detection of malware and intrusions, the assessment of vulnerabilities, and means for protecting not only technical infrastructures, but also data as well as the reputation of organizations and individuals,” Diesner said.

At the meeting, Diesner gave a talk on “Mapping and Investigating Covert Networks via Network Analysis and Text Mining.” Her presentation included a discussion of her research on computational methods and technologies for mapping and analyzing the structure and dynamics of covert networks and networks of sub-state and non-state actors. For this work, she drew on her research on a crisis in a major business corporation and conflicts between ethnic groups in the Sudan, respectively.

Diesner finds that theories and methods from information science, including socio-technical data analytics, are essential for developing effective solutions to cybersecurity threats and problems. “Preventing and responding to cybercrime are often information management tasks,” she said. “Understanding fundamental principles and underlying mechanics related to the flow, production, and processing of information in the given context is indispensable for analyzing and solving cybercrime issues.”

Diesner previously organized two similar cybersecurity meetings as a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon. “I find these meetings a great opportunity for strengthening the dialogue between academic researchers, subject matter experts, and practitioners who all work in this area,” she said. After the meeting in Chicago, Diesner traveled with a group of experts for briefings at the FBI and the National Defense University, among other institutions, in the Washington, D.C. area.