Shaping Operations to Attack Robust Terror Networks
Devon Callahan, Paulo Shakarian, Jeffrey Nielsen, Anthony N. Johnson

TL;DR
This paper proposes a method to weaken terrorist networks by strategically removing nodes to increase their centrality, thereby reducing their ability to regenerate leadership after disruption.
Contribution
It introduces a novel shaping operation framework, formalizes the problem, proves its NP-Completeness, and provides an efficient heuristic for real-world application.
Findings
Removing 12% of nodes increases network centrality by 17-45%
The heuristic scales to networks with over 1,000 nodes
The approach effectively disrupts network resilience
Abstract
Security organizations often attempt to disrupt terror or insurgent networks by targeting "high value targets" (HVT's). However, there have been numerous examples that illustrate how such networks are able to quickly re-generate leadership after such an operation. Here, we introduce the notion of a "shaping" operation in which the terrorist network is first targeted for the purpose of reducing its leadership re-generation ability before targeting HVT's. We look to conduct shaping by maximizing the network-wide degree centrality through node removal. We formally define this problem and prove solving it is NP-Complete. We introduce a mixed integer-linear program that solves this problem exactly as well as a greedy heuristic for more practical use. We implement the greedy heuristic and found in examining five real-world terrorist networks that removing only 12% of nodes can increase the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsNetwork Security and Intrusion Detection · Software-Defined Networks and 5G · Information and Cyber Security
