A Moment of Weakness

Abstract

By targeting communication and power networks, malicious actors can significantly disrupt our society. As networks are more vulnerable after a natural disaster, this moment of weakness may be exploited to disrupt the network even further. However, the potential impact and mitigation of such a follow-up attack has yet to be studied. In this paper,we propose a frame work to analyze the impact of a combination of a natural disaster followed by a targeted single node failure. We apply this frame work on empirical disaster data and two network topologies. Our ex- periments show that even small targeted attacks can significantly augment the already grave network disruption caused by a natural disaster. We further show that this effect can be mitigated by adopting a calculated repair strategy.