Strategic Effects-based Objective Approach to Determine the Likelihood of Possible Terrorist Attacks

The goal of this research is to extend TMODS (Terrorist Modus Operandi Detection System), that has been funded by DARPA¿s EELD (Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery) and Genoa 2, and TIA programs. TMODS uses terrorist network analysis (TNA) to build the representation for abnormal social networks indicative of terrorist or illicit network-centric cells and searches for these patterns in huge pools of transactional information to detect terrorist activities. We have integrated TMODS with CAT (Casual Analysis Tool) to enable analyzing the existence and detection of these cells to compute the probability of actual terrorist events and derive a probabilistic plan assessment of the successful execution of a terrorist event. Under this proposed Homeland Security SBIR effort, we will leverage this integration and develop new functionality for obtaining and reasoning about knowledge about terrorist groups, terrorist attack methods, and infrastructure targets to produce a strategic vulnerability assessment tool. Our proposed TMODS extensions will add the specific information about specific infrastructure targets, terrorist groups, and terrorist attack methods through ontology, process, and causal models to reason about the likelihood of attack and what method against critical infrastructure assets.