Research in 2019

At least three times during a tenure track, Adelphi University grants all tenure track faculty at the ability to reduce teaching load by three credits in order to focus on research.

This semester, I received my second research release. I intend to spend it on a few projects:

• Phishing is commonly accepted as the most effective initial attack vector by which organizations are breached. There is much anecdotal “lore” as to how to improve the ability of human actors to recognize scams, but, in fact, not a great amount of research has been conducted in this field. I intend to develop a few ideas and field-test them

• Conceptual modeling is a technique used to enhance our understanding of complex systems. In our world, Threat Modeling is a frequently recognized term. Can current threat modeling techniques be improved?

• One of the foundational concepts of CSIRTs was that, through information sharing, threats would be identified early enough to be mitigated on time. Today, many vendors sell “Threat Intelligence”. But, is there a good understanding as to what constitutes good threat intel? How can SOCs use threat intelligence more effectively?

• What does a typical workflow of a SOC look like? How can those workflows managed more effectively?

In all of these projects, I hope to include students. If you are interested in any of these topics, please stop by my office!