Identification of Critical Resources and Cyber Threats in the Physical Domain

Military organizations, civilian government agencies, and private companies are all undergoing an unprecedented growth in cyber attacks targeting their information infrastructures and causing serious disruptions to their operations. To date, much attention has been paid to determining ways to defend the information networks and preserve information flow. Clearly, there is an insufficient amount of resources to provide this protection and so it becomes necessary to determine the criticality of the network assets and activities to preserving the mission, even in the face of cyber and/or physical attacks. To address this problem, 21CT is proposing the Asset Threat Analysis Capability (ATAC), a system dynamics modeling approach that will represent the cyber and physical networks used to accomplish one or more military missions. The model will consist of the key assets and activities and the interactions needed to satisfy military objectives. It will give military planners a capability to analyze these assets and activities using the ATAC model as a"what if"tool to determine the effects of disrupting a particular activity on one or more military missions.