Negotiating With Infrastructure Cyberterrorists

Researchers design a negotiation strategy to help cities and organizations minimize losses when their data are held hostage

- Rob Matheson

In ransomware cyberattacks, hackers steal a victim’s sensitive data and threaten to publish or block access to it unless a ransom is paid. Across the globe each year, millions of ransomware attacks are carried out on businesses, cities, and organizations, costing billions of dollars total in payments and damages. Many technologies can thwart such cyberattacks, but MIT Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL) and Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) researchers believe there’s more to solving the issue than deploying the latest software.

Based on business negotiation strategies, the researchers designed a “cyber negotiation” framework, published recently in the Journal of Cyber Policy, that details a step-by-step process for what to do before, during, and after an attack. Lead author and CSAIL and DUSP researcher Gregory Falco, who founded the critical-infrastructure cybersecurity startup NeuroMesh, spoke to MIT News about the plan. He was joined on the paper by coauthors Alicia Noriega SM ’18, a DUSP alumna; and Lawrence Susskind, the Ford Professor of Environmental and Urban Planning and a researcher for the Internet Policy Research Initiative and the MIT Science Impact Collaborative.

What are cities, especially, up against with ransomware attacks, and why not just invent better technologies to defend against these attacks?