The UK government has initiated a research program aimed at finding ways to avert catastrophic software failures in critical IT networks like healthcare or banking systems.
"Taken together, the blackout and the worm underscore a far-reaching challenge in managing modern technological societies: the difficulty of reaping the benefits of networks - railroad networks, airline networks, telephone networks, power networks and computer networks, among others - while minimizing their vulnerabilities."
Computer programs designed to 'evolve' solutions to mathematical problems support the idea that complexity in nature emerges in small, often apparently unremarkable, steps. Complex biological organisms are thought to develop through a series of intermediary evolutionary adaptations, rather than in single giant evolutionary leaps.
New intelligence software finds meaning in the chaos of clues scattered throughout data-saturated networks. The challenge: to unravel terrorist plots before they happen.
The author argues that the U.S. should look to social network analysis and the successful campaign against the terrorist group Abu Nidal in the 1980s for lessons on how to respond to the current terrorist threat.
Analysts warn that the U.S. is more vulnerable to terrorist threats now than before Sept. 11, 2001 and will remain so until they can take a 'systems' approach to resolving vulnerabilities.
New research on the topology of the internet indicates that it is "scale-free". The practical implication of this finding is that efforts to control computer viruses (or possibly file-sharing networks) are shifting away from a focus on exponentially increasing the number of disinfected machines to focusing on a few key hub machines that control the network.
Analysts warn that recent U.S. government 'war games' to predict the effects of terrorist attacks fail to take into account the set of "interdependencies," or specific repercussions, that affect the outcome when a disaster in one industry wreaks havoc on the nearby, dependent infrastructures of other sectors.
An interesting story on how "social network analysis" and complexity theory is being used to plan the attack on Iraq.
Bruce Schneier, a top security expert, says America's approach to protecting itself from terrorism will only make matters worse. Forget "foolproof" technology?we need systems designed to fail smartly.