ND in the News

Last year, we consulted a University of Notre Dame Urban Adaption Assessment which focuses on issues like sea level rise and heat.

Seamus Deane's contribution to critical and creative writing was delivered, not only at home in Ireland but in some of the most prestigious universities of the United States of America, be it Berkeley, Notre Dame, Indiana, Oregon. 

Tamara Kay is a sociologist studying trade, global health and globalization at the Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame... Susan Ostermann is a political scientist at the Keough School of Global Affairs, Notre Dame and a former attorney at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, specializing in intellectual property law.

A career in academia saw him lecture at University College Dublin and later become professor at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, in the United States.

"The attacks were extremely sophisticated, and they were able to defeat some pretty sophisticated security controls, or the right degree of security controls weren't in place," Mike Chapple said. 

Timothy P. O’Malley, Ph.D., is the director of education at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.

Here & Now's Tonya Mosley speaks with Mike Chapple, cyber-security expert and information technology professor at The University of Notre Dame, about what the attack says about U.S. infrastructure vulnerabilities.

Mike Chapple, teaching professor of IT, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business and a former computer scientist with the National Security Agency, said systems that control pipelines should not be connected to the internet and vulnerable to cyber intrusions.

“It doesn’t have to be a sophisticated plan. It doesn’t even have to be a good plan in order to support a conspiracy charge,” said Jimmy Gurulé, a University of Notre Dame law professor. 

"The fact that this attack compromised systems that control pipeline infrastructure indicates that either the attack was extremely sophisticated or the systems were not well secured," said Mike Chapple, a computer science professor at Notre Dame.

Mike Chapple, teaching professor of IT, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business and a former computer scientist with the National Security Agency, said systems that control pipelines should not be connected to the internet and vulnerable to cyber intrusions.

Mike Chapple, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Notre Dame and former National Security Agency official, said the Colonial Pipeline attack appeared to show the hackers were “extremely sophisticated” or that the systems weren’t properly secured.

Regardless of how quickly Colonial gets operations restored, “this pipeline shutdown sends the message that core elements of our national infrastructure continue to be vulnerable to cyberattack,” says Mike Chapple, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. 

“You don’t very often see a company fight a federal agency like this,” said Kaitlin Wowak, an assistant professor of operations at Notre Dame University, who studies product recalls.

Kaitlin Wowak, assistant professor of IT, analytics, and operations at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business who specializes in recalls, said that while Peloton may have learned from its mistakes, its failure to immediately recall the treadmills is troubling.

Kaitlin Wowak, an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, said there are a number of reasons that companies might initially resist product recalls, including concerns about costs and the cultural dynamics within an organization.

Elizabeth Renieris, director of the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, said the ruling is unlikely to end the controversy about content moderation.

All that contributes to America’s record-low birthrates, says Notre Dame economics professor Kasey Buckles, but she’s not ready to call it a crisis yet.

The board’s decision “will be far less important than the rationale behind it,” said Elizabeth Renieris, founding director of the Technology Ethics Lab at the University of Notre Dame. 

The definition of what is holy changes over time, says Kathleen Sprows Cummings, history professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of the book A Saint of Our Own. “We reinvent saints in each age.”