Jack pandemus – Cyber incident and emergency response during a pandemic

ABSTRACT COVID-19 quickly gave rise to a newly expansive space wrought with unforeseen vulnerabilities. Cyber threat actors swiftly identified this space and immediately began seizing targets of opportunity amid chaotic conditions. Recognizing this emerging challenge, our goal was to find a mechanism that would support better understanding of holistic cyber incident response in the context of emergency management amid pandemic circumstances. Therefore, we conducted Jack Pandemus, a distributed event that simulated concurrent cyber and emergency incident response challenges. This event first occurred with Charleston, South Carolina followed by Savannah, Georgia. Each iteration included public and private sector entities whose positions corresponded with real-world cyber incident and/or emergency response. Jack Pandemus introduced a cascading multisector cyber incident under pandemic conditions with a focus on identifying cross-sector gaps, dependencies, constraints, strengths, and lessons learned. Jack Pandemus ultimately revealed: that physical pandemic stressors can significantly impact cyber incident response; that emergency response remains primarily focused on pandemic impacts despite concurrent cyber consequences; that locally shared resources are quickly exhausted during a multisector crisis; that significant confusion remains between public and private sectors regarding how and when to request additional support; and that cybersecurity is not treated as an operational problem despite considerable cascading potential.