A Moment of Weakness : Protecting Against Targeted Attacks Following a Natural Disaster

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 framework to analyze the impact of a combination of a natural disaster followed by a targeted single node failure. We apply this framework on empirical disaster data and two network topologies. Our experiments 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.