The MIT Sloan School of Management has launched a new cybersecurity consortium aimed at bringing together security researchers and business to improve the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure. The Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, also known as (IC) 3 will focus on the strategic, managerial, and operational issues related to cybersecurity.
“The cybersecurity of our critical infrastructure is a serious national security challenge. This new consortium will help MIT Sloan to make a deep and lasting impact in this area through interdisciplinary research and industry partnerships,” says MIT Sloan Dean David Schmittlein.
(IC)3, which is pronounced “IC-cube”, includes diverse and interdisciplinary faculty, with professors from MIT Sloan, the School of Engineering, and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. The initiative also works in collaboration with industry partners across the entire infrastructure value chain. Partners include ExxonMobil, Schneider Electric, Limelight Networks and, NextNine.
The consortium will initially focus on a handful of research projects that include developing metrics and models for organizations for cyber-risk analysis; simulation and modeling of cybersecurity resilience, and applying lessons learned from “accident” prevention research to prevent cybersecurity failures.
In addition, certain projects will be conducted in collaboration with international academic partners, initially Masdar Institute (Abu Dhabi) and Singapore University for Technology and Design.
The consortium is one of three interrelated and collaborative programs at MIT that will focus on cybersecurity. The effort is partly backed by a $15 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. That grant helped to launch the MIT Cybersecurity Policy Initiative (CPI), which will collaborate with (IC)3, alongside MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) which just launched Cybersecurity@CSAIL, an initiative focused on the more technical aspects of cybersecurity infrastructure.
MIT isn’t the first school to launch an effort like this, others in closer proximity to Washington DC including the Universities of Virginia and Maryland are building similar efforts.
