Unal Tatar

Unal Tatar joined the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity (CEHC) at the University at Albany in 2018 and is currently an assistant professor.

Dr. Tatar has been working on cybersecurity since 2004 in several capacities – as an engineer, a researcher and an academic. Most recently, he served as the head of the National Computer Emergency Response Team of Turkey (TR-CERT) where he coordinated national cybersecurity exercises and took part in the creation of the first national cybersecurity strategy.

He started his cybersecurity career at the National Cybersecurity Research Institute (NCRI), an affiliated institution of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. He also had a chance to work in international organizations and initiatives such as the NATO Center of Excellence Defense Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) as an academic advisor. At NATO COE-DAT, he organized two workshops on cyber terrorism and prepared the curriculum for a course on terrorist use of cyber space. He participated in NATO Cyber Defense Exercises and developed some of the scenarios. Dr. Tatar carried out a research project with NATO Combined Joint Operations from the Sea Centre of Excellence (CJOS-COE) for analyzing the cyber risks in maritime domain.

He is currently one of only two engineers in the 21-member Cyber Terrorism Project, a multidisciplinary, multi-institution project which facilitates debate on core questions relating to cyberterrorism.

Research Interests

Dr. Tatar’s research focuses on decision making in the cybersecurity context. He has three main lines of inquiry: the economics of cybersecurity and risk management, critical infrastructure protection and national security, and cybersecurity capacity building and workforce development. He has used methods and theories emphasizing information, people, process, technology, organizations, and their interactions, to provide the desirable interdisciplinary perspective for cybersecurity research. To address the research questions in his research lines, he has collaborated with scholars from a diverse set of disciplinary backgrounds to use the established theories in their disciplines as a framework of his study and have a multifaceted perspective.

Dr. Tatar is currently the PI of an NSF-funded project entitled “CRII: SaTC: Graph-based Probabilistic Cyber Risk Modeling.” In this project, he is developing a graph-theoretical functional dependency approach to model and quantify the ripple effects of cyber-attacks on enterprise missions to failures in supply-chains. He is also PI/Co-PI of several other projects funded by DOD, NSA, ONR, AFRL, NATO and several foundations. These projects are about capacity building in cybersecurity, blockchain for supply chain security, and cyber risk quantification. As of October 2021, Dr. Tatar’s research has resulted in two edited books, 25 peer-reviewed publications, seven book chapters, three technical reports, and 35 peer-reviewed/invited presentations.

CEHC Courses Taught

CEHC 242 – Cybersecurity

CEHC 391 Research Internship

CINF 124X – Cybersecurity Basics

CINF 306 – Information Security and Assurance

CINF 496 – Special Topics in Informatics: Economics of Cybersecurity

CINF 596 – Special Topics in Informatics: Economics of Cybersecurity

CINF 899 – Doctoral Dissertation

CIST 677 – Intelligence Analysis Research Seminar

CIST 678 – Internship Information Science