When the Levee Breaks: Understanding Cyber-Physical and Cyber-Operational Attacks Against Critical Infrastructure by Terrorists and Extremists
The Unconventional and Asymmetric Threats Division of START is seeking highly motivated students with a strong interest in national security, research methodologies, and dataset development. The role involves supporting the collection, codification, and analysis of cyber-physical and cyber-operational attacks targeting critical infrastructure. This internship focuses on rigorous processes of data management and analysis, encompassing tasks such as data collection and assisting with rapid literature reviews to enhance comprehensive research on cyber-physical and cyber-operational attacks against critical infrastructure on a global scale.
Supervisor: Megan Rutter (mrutter@umd.edu)
Deadline: October 24, 2024 at 11:59pm ET
Required application materials: Resume, cover letter, and unofficial transcripts
U.S. Citizenship Required: U.S. Persons Only (U.S. Citizenship or U.S. Permanent Residents)
Team Meeting Times: Tentatively Tuesday a.m.
In-person Days: Tentatively Tuesday, Wednesday, and/or Thursday
Internship position(s) contingent on project funding
Responsibilities:
- Data Collection on Cyber-Physical and Cyber-Operational Attacks:
- Gather and compile detailed data on cyber-physical and cyber-operational attacks targeting critical infrastructure, ensuring comprehensive coverage across multiple industries and regions.
- Monitor and document emerging trends, incidents, and vulnerabilities that pose threats to critical infrastructure, drawing from reliable sources such as intelligence reports, news, and government publications.
- Data Cleaning:
- Review and clean collected data to ensure accuracy, completeness, and consistency by removing errors, duplicates, and irrelevant entries.
- Apply data standardization processes to align all collected data with predefined formats and structures for further use in analysis.
- Coding Data into the SMICI Dataset:
- Code the cleaned data into the SMICI (Significant Multi-domain Incidents against Critical Infrastructure) dataset following established protocols and coding schemes.
- Ensure accurate categorization and tagging of incidents to enhance the reliability of the dataset and make it ready for analytical use.
- Assist with Data Analysis:
- Support analysts in conducting data-driven research by providing organized, cleaned, and coded datasets for use in statistical and qualitative analysis
- Contribute to the generation of insights and reports, offering key findings from SMICI dataset.
- Assist with Literature Reviews for Rapid Reviews:
- Conduct literature searches and assist in summarizing academic articles, reports, and policy documents for use in rapid rewards
- Help organize and synthesize findings from the literature into concise, relevant summaries that inform ongoing research and analysis on cyber physical and cyber-operational attacks against critical infrastructure.
Required/minimum qualifications:
- Experience or coursework related to security studies, international affairs, cybersecurity, computer science, or a related program
- Coursework or experience with open-source research and social science research methods
- Knowledge of systematic literature reviews and social science datasets
- Excellent attention to detail and organizational skills
- Proficiency with Microsoft Excel and Google Workspace
Preferred/Ideal qualifications:
- Experience with social science coding schemes and codebooks
- Experience in social science dataset coding (entering unstructured data into a structured dataset)
- Experience conducting systematic literature reviews