Established | 2004 |
---|---|
Field of research | Information Security |
Director | David M. Nicol |
Location | Urbana, Illinois |
Affiliations | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign |
Website | Official website |
The Information Trust Institute (ITI) was founded in 2004 as an interdisciplinary unit designed to approach information security research from a systems perspective. It examines information security by looking at what makes machines, applications, and users trustworthy. [1] Its mission is to create computer systems, software, and networks that society can depend on to be trustworthy, meaning secure, dependable (reliable and available), correct, safe, private, and survivable.
ITI [2] is an academic/industry partnership [1] focusing on application areas such as electric power, financial systems, defense, and homeland security. It brings together over 100 researchers representing numerous colleges and units at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
ITI is hosted at University of Illinois's Urbana campus. [3] [4]
Other participants are based at:
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Adam Janofsky is IIT's associate director of technology. [8]
Funding of the institute is both from government agencies [9] and corporations. [5] It both receives and gives out grants.
Computer security is the protection of computer systems and networks from threats that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, theft of hardware, software, or data, as well as from the disruption or misdirection of the services they provide.
The SANS Institute is a private U.S. for-profit company founded in 1989 that specializes in information security, cybersecurity training, and selling certificates. Topics available for training include cyber and network defenses, penetration testing, incident response, digital forensics, and auditing. The information security courses are developed through a consensus process involving administrators, security managers, and information security professionals. The courses cover security fundamentals and technical aspects of information security. The institute has been recognized for its training programs and certification programs. Per 2021, SANS is the world’s largest cybersecurity research and training organization. SANS is an acronym for SysAdmin, Audit, Network, and Security.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
Cyberterrorism is the use of the Internet to conduct violent acts that result in, or threaten, the loss of life or significant bodily harm, in order to achieve political or ideological gains through threat or intimidation. Emerging alongside the development of infomration technology, cyberterrorism involves acts of deliberate, large-scale disruption of computer networks, especially of personal computers attached to the Internet by means of tools such as computer viruses, computer worms, phishing, malicious software, hardware methods, and programming scripts can all be forms of internet terrorism. Some authors opt for a very narrow definition of cyberterrorism, relating to deployment by known terrorist organizations of disruption attacks against information systems for the primary purpose of creating alarm, panic, or physical disruption. Other authors prefer a broader definition, which includes cybercrime. Participating in a cyberattack affects the terror threat perception, even if it isn't done with a violent approach. By some definitions, it might be difficult to distinguish which instances of online activities are cyberterrorism or cybercrime.
Thomas M. Siebel is an American billionaire businessman, technologist, and author. He was the founder of enterprise software company Siebel Systems and is the founder, chairman, and CEO of C3.ai, an artificial intelligence software platform and applications company.
ILLIAC was a series of supercomputers built at a variety of locations, some at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In all, five computers were built in this series between 1951 and 1974. Some more modern projects also use the name.
United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.
The MISTIC, or Michigan State Integral Computer, was the first computer system at Michigan State University and was built by its students, faculty and staff in 1957. Powered by vacuum tubes, its design was based on ILLIAC, the supercomputer built at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, a descendant of the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann.
The Illinois Security Lab is a research laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign established in 2004 to support research and education in computer and network security. The lab is part of the Computer Science Department and Information Trust Institute. Its current research projects concern health information technology and critical infrastructure protection. Past projects addressed messaging, networking, and privacy.
The smart grid is an enhancement of the 20th century electrical grid, using two-way communications and distributed so-called intelligent devices. Two-way flows of electricity and information could improve the delivery network. Research is mainly focused on three systems of a smart grid – the infrastructure system, the management system, and the protection system. Electronic power conditioning and control of the production and distribution of electricity are important aspects of the smart grid.
Bruce Howard McCormick (1928–2007) was an American computer scientist, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and founding director of the Brain Networks Lab at Texas A&M University.
Cyberwarfare by Russia includes denial of service attacks, hacker attacks, dissemination of disinformation and propaganda, participation of state-sponsored teams in political blogs, internet surveillance using SORM technology, persecution of cyber-dissidents and other active measures. According to investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, some of these activities were coordinated by the Russian signals intelligence, which was part of the FSB and formerly a part of the 16th KGB department. An analysis by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2017 outlines Russia's view of "Information Countermeasures" or IPb as "strategically decisive and critically important to control its domestic populace and influence adversary states", dividing 'Information Countermeasures' into two categories of "Informational-Technical" and "Informational-Psychological" groups. The former encompasses network operations relating to defense, attack, and exploitation and the latter to "attempts to change people's behavior or beliefs in favor of Russian governmental objectives."
Ravishankar K. Iyer is the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a specialist in reliable and secure networks and systems.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to computer security:
SCADA Strangelove is an independent group of information security researchers founded in 2012, focused on security assessment of industrial control systems (ICS) and SCADA.
Cyberwarfare is a component of the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine since the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014. While the first attacks on information systems of private enterprises and state institutions of Ukraine were recorded during mass protests in 2013, Russian cyberweapon Uroburos had been around since 2005. Russian cyberwarfare continued with the 2015 Ukraine power grid hack at Christmas 2015 and again in 2016, paralysis of the State Treasury of Ukraine in December 2016, a Mass hacker supply-chain attack in June 2017 and attacks on Ukrainian government websites in January 2022.
Sandworm is an advanced persistent threat operated by Military Unit 74455, a cyberwarfare unit of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service. Other names for the group, given by cybersecurity researchers, include Telebots, Voodoo Bear, IRIDIUM, Seashell Blizzard, and Iron Viking.
Edward G. Amoroso is an American computer security professional, entrepreneur, author, and educator based in the New York City area. His research interests have centered on techniques and criteria for measuring trustworthy software development. the application of these methods to secure software development for critical projects in the defense and aerospace industries, and redefining trust parameters for improved security in the cloud.
The IT Army of Ukraine is a volunteer cyberwarfare organisation created at the end of February 2022 to fight against digital intrusion of Ukrainian information and cyberspace after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The group also conducts offensive cyberwarfare operations, and Chief of Head of State Special Communications Service of Ukraine Victor Zhora said its enlisted hackers would only attack military targets.
Once a cyberattack has been initiated, certain targets need to be attacked to cripple the opponent. Certain infrastructures as targets have been highlighted as critical infrastructures in times of conflict that can severely cripple a nation. Control systems, energy resources, finance, telecommunications, transportation, and water facilities are seen as critical infrastructure targets during conflict. A new report on the industrial cybersecurity problems, produced by the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and the PA Consulting Group, using data from as far back as 1981, reportedly has found a 10-fold increase in the number of successful cyber attacks on infrastructure Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems since 2000. Cyberattacks that have an adverse physical effect are known as cyber-physical attacks.