Inaugural Volatility and Risk Institute Conference: Cyber Resilience: Managing the Consequences of Risk Contagion
Friday, April 24, 2020NYU Stern School of Business
The Volatility and Risk Institute will hold our annual conference on the theme, "Cyber Resilience: Managing the Consequences of Risk Contagion," on Friday, April 24, 2020 at the NYU Stern School of Business.
Industry, government and civil society are properly concerned with how to better allocate societal resources to the endless struggle over cybersecurity. The sophistication of threats and society’s attack surface will continue to increase and as we continue to digitize our lives the effects of incidents will be more keenly felt, which makes mitigating the effects of inevitable losses -- resilience -- a critical response to cyber insecurity.
This year's VRI Conference will center on two inter-related and important aspects of resilience to cyber attacks on our critical infrastructures:
First, the risks flowing from an attack on critical infrastructure likely will propagate across sectors of our society in complex and surprising ways. For example, a successful attack on the power grid could cripple businesses, governments and households, spilling over adversely into food, shelter and health, not to mention information and financial services, and creating contagion. These spillovers and the interconnectedness of our world means that understanding and capturing the risks from a cyber failure is a multi-sectoral, interdisciplinary exercise. The conference will feature efforts to assess and analyze such spillovers.
Second, risk propagation requires risk mitigation to propagate as well. To build resilience, every link in the chain matters, both strong and weak. Effective mitigation may will see resources allocated to a sector that is seemingly small and/or far removed from the one suffering the cyber attack, but which is connected to it. Building multi-sector resiliency is complex: What information is needed to assess propagating risks and mitigation efforts? How should the efforts to capture, analyze and monitor propagating risks and mitigation efforts be organized; what are the proper roles for businesses, governments and citizens? What incentives are needed to foster these multi-sector efforts? How should the costs of these efforts be captured and paid for? How should nations collaborate and coordinate these efforts across borders? The conference will try through individual and panel presentations to answer these questions.
The conference will be free and open to the public. We will release a full schedule and open registration in early Feburary. If you would like to be added to our mailing list for updates, including a notification when we open registration, please email us at vi@stern.nyu.edu.
For information on past Volatility and Risk Institute conferences, you can visit our past conference page.