The Army Cyber Institute is building a portable, tailorable platform for cities to practice responding to cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure.
“For a long time we assumed uncontested homeland, and now that’s not necessarily as good of an assumption as it used to be,” said Lt. Col. Erica Mitchell, research lead for the critical infrastructure/key resources team at the Army Cyber Institute.
The idea stems from the series of exercises created by the institute, the Army’s cyber think tank at West Point, to investigate how cyberattacks affect critical infrastructure at the local level — for systems such as telecommunications or water service, for example. In some cases, the exercises examined how a serious cyber assault could impact military forces stateside from deploying overseas.