Since the attacks on 9/11/01, great strides have been made in identifying the Nation’s  critical infrastructures and developing methods to protect them from the Hun. Now that some initial defenses have been put in place, it is time for the infrastructure providers to establish ongoing programs to continue to keep the country’s food supply safe. Security is not an annoying event, but a business process; a cycle that must continue to roll forward and continuously improve to be effective.

We are offering an ongoing cycle of security based on the principles of the great Chinese general, Sun Tzu and the CARVER+Shock vulnerability assessment methodology that provides training and education, continual assessments of agriculture commodities, and most importantly a mitigation strategy to protect your critical infrastructure.

 

Infrastructure Projects we have Supported:

·         The White House Homeland Security Council, Bio Security Team

·         The US Department of Agriculture, APHIS

·         US Department of Health and Human Services

·         Food and Drug Administration Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN)

·         Government of Mexico Food and Agriculture Officials

·         Privately owned Nuclear Power Plants

·         National Pork Producers Council

·         Various Port and Airlift facilities

·         US NORTHERN COMMAND

·         Fortune 100 Energy Companies

CARVER+Shock Vulnerability Assessment Tool

As the Director of The US Army’s Homeland Infrastructure Security Threats Office we developed a vulnerability assessment tool that was ubiquitous across all critical infrastructures known as the CARVER+Shock Vulnerability Assessment Tool.  Over the past five years this methodology has been used to uncover previously unidentified weaknesses in multiple agriculture commodities, food, power, and transportation industries.  Listed below is the history of the tool, an explanation of the process of implementing the tool, and why this tool is superior to many other tools of this sort.

CARVER was originally developed as a targeting tool for used by US Special Operations Forces to quickly and thoroughly analyze enemy critical infrastructure to identify a critical node against which a small well-trained force can launch an attack to disable or destroy that infrastructure.  With this in mind, we selected the CARVER targeting tool and reversed engineered it as a vulnerability assessment tool.  Click here to see an example of how the tool works.

The Principles of Sun Tzu...

Sun Tzu was a great Chinese general who defeated many armies much larger than his.  He did so by applying these basic concepts:

Know Yourself.  This includes the entire infrastructure or facility to be assessed.  Many other VA systems attempt to identify only critical systems to evaluate in the hopes of saving time and resources.  This shortcut can overlook crucial vulnerabilities as proven time and again by users of this tool.  Results show that significant vulnerability lies in areas that most experts never considered critical and may have overlooked. 

Know The Threat Actual, localize threat for a specific target system Design basis threat for a higher-level assessment as used by the federal government. We must understand Who the threat is, Why they want to attack, How they will attack you, and What is their desired effect.

Know Your Environment.  This is information about the physical, political, and legal environment that effect the target system and the threat.

Know what your enemy knows about you.  This is an additional component to this pre-assessment information sometimes called Red Teaming.  It is not required to identify the actual vulnerabilities, it is used more to predict probability of attack.