Terrorism Threat Modeling

Binera, with support from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and critical infrastructure stakeholders, has developed a groundbreaking, empirically-based method to produce probabilistic threat estimates for terrorism scenarios that are defensible, consistent, and which can be used as the basis for terrorism risk assessment.

Developing frequency estimates for terrorism scenarios is a challenging undertaking, due to the uncertainty in human-driven attacks and the reliance on a limited historical dataset. Binera’s comprehensive approach to these issues provides a consistent, data-driven methodology for estimation, specifically accounting for the uncertainty in such scenarios and incorporating available intelligence information. This approach removes the vagaries and inconsistency that are inherent in Subject Matter Expert driven threat assessment.

Statistical analysis of frequency estimates provide a true measure of the threat of an attack. These objective estimates are critical to informed decision making regarding terrorism risk and are a key component of an all-hazards risk management capability, allowing a direct comparison of threat and risk between different hazard types. 

Binera’s enhanced terrorism threat model has been employed at some of the nation’s busiest regional and national transportation agencies, for State level Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessments (THIRAs), and by Federal agencies to protect critical infrastructure.