PhD Thesis Defense: Assessing the Global Cyber and Biological Threat
Title: Assessing the Global Cyber and Biological Threat
Candidate: Ghita Mezzour
When: Tue April 14, 9-11am,
Where: GHC 6115, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: In today's inter-connected world, threats can have serious global repercussions. In particular,
two types of threats have a global impact: 1) cyber crime and 2) cyber and biological weapons. If
a country's environment is conducive to cyber crime, cyber criminals will use that country as a
basis to attack end-users around the world. Cyber and biological weapons can now allow a small
actor to inflict major damage on a major military power. If cyber and biological weapons are used
in combination, the damage can be amplified significantly.
Given that the cyber and biological threat is global, it is important to identify countries that pose
the greatest threat and design action plans to reduce the threat from these countries. However,
prior work on cyber crime lacks empirical substantiation for reasons why some countries'
environments are conducive to cyber crime. Prior work on cyber and biological weapon
capabilities mainly consists of case studies, which are not generalizeable. To sum up, assessing
the global cyber and biological threat currently lacks a systematic empirical approach.
In this thesis, I take an empirical and systematic approach towards assessing the global cyber
and biological threat. The first part of the thesis focuses on cyber crime. I empirically identify
factors that cause some countries to host or encounter disproportionate quantities of attacks.
This work uses Symantec's telemetry data, collected from 10 million Symantec customer
computers worldwide. I find that addressing corruption in Eastern Europe or computer piracy in
Sub-Saharan Africa has the potential to significantly reduce the global cyber crime.
The second part of the thesis focuses on cyber and biological weapon capabilities. I develop
computational methodologies to assess countries' biological and cyber weapon capabilities. The
methodologies examine all countries in the world and can be used by non-experts that only have
access to publicly available data. I validate the biological weapon assessment methodology by
comparing the methodology's assessment to historical data. This work has the potential to
proactively reduce the global cyber and biological weapon threat.
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