IACSP Event Review: CARVERCON 2.0

By Paige Morrison and Sami Araboghli

Two years ago, the inaugural 2018 CARVER Target Analysis and Vulnerability Assessment Conference - aka CARVERCON – was hit by an unexpected snowstorm in downtown Washington DC. Despite still being a well-attended and successful event, the conference organizer, Security Management International (SMI), decided that the next CARVERCON would definitely be held in a warmer climate. Miami Beach or Nassau, Bahamas both sounded ideal. Fortunately, the U.S. Marines at the University of South Florida’s Office of Veteran Success were familiar with the CARVER Methodology and were anxious to contribute their resources. Thus, CARVERCON 2.0 was held along the sunny shores of the Gulf of Mexico at the beautiful USF campus in Sarasota, Florida.

For readers not familiar with CARVER, the vulnerability assessment process is a globally recognized methodology used extensively by the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities. It is both an offensive and defensive tool which can assess and analyze risk, based upon a wide variety of threats and adversaries, as well as analyze potential enemy targets to ensure maximum impact.

CARVER is an acronym for:

CriticalityAccessibility RecognizabilityVulnerabilityEffectRecoverability

Originally created by the Central Intelligence Agency (hence the reason Aston Martin continues to be the lead sponsor of CARVERCON – i.e., James Bond) to be a predictive process in the defense against terrorism...