‘Data-driven’ vulnerability assessment tools and the quantification of refugee life in Uganda

This chapter explores the state of the art in existing climate change risk, vulnerability, and adaptation assessment tools, with a focus on web-based tools. It then details the development and application of two online decision support tools created for climate change adaptation planning in cities – a Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Tool and Surface Temperature and Runoff (STAR) Tools. Both are freely available web-GIS tools that can be used to inform policy, strategy, and development. The Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Tool, developed through a collaborative and iterative process, follows the principles of an online public participation GIS. The Assessment Tool delivers GIS data and analysis functions online, widening the possibilities for participation in climate change adaptation planning. The STAR Tools enable assessment of the impacts of climate change on temperature and runoff in a specified urban area and evaluate the potential of green infrastructure as a climate change adaptation response. The STAR Tools can be used to develop “what if” scenarios, to illustrate how changes resulting from different land surface cover and climate change scenarios can impact upon local surface temperatures and runoff. The chapter presents the lessons learned from the development and application of these tools in municipalities across Europe and discusses key challenges for developing such tools to aid effective climate change adaptation planning in cities.

This paper designs and implements a unified and intelligent tool for vulnerability assessment which can efficiently assess vulnerabilities of computer systems in which functions of the vulnerability assessment were distributed. Developing a vulnerability assessment tool needs two steps; constructing a vulnerability analysis database and implementing a vulnerability assessment tool. The vulnerability analysis database is constructed based on CVE to report vulnerabilities in standard assessment result forms by updating newest information, and is organized to be suitable to the distributed network. The vulnerability assessment tool is implemented using Nessus and OVAL. The vulnerability assessment tool suggested in this paper can provide fast and more accurate vulnerability assessment and proper guidelines to corresponding vulnerabilities.

Food fraud vulnerability assessment: Reliable data sources and effective assessment approaches

Chapter 3 - Vulnerability Assessment Tools

It is an essential network security management process to grasp the network security status precisely and rapidly by identifying the vulnerabilities on the network. Manual check-up method by security experts and automatic vulnerability assessment tools can be used to check the network security. But it is inevitable option to use the automatic vulnerability assessment tools to cover large-scale network. There are lots of automatic vulnerability assessment tools available in the market. But the vulnerability assessment tool cannot find an acceptable percentage of vulnerabilities by itself. When the multiple vulnerability assessment tools are used, integrating and analyzing the results can be a time-consuming job. This paper presents the implementation of the automated network vulnerability assessment framework which can integrate various kinds of vulnerability assessment tools with the purpose of complementing each other, manage them consistently from the central manager, and be easily extended to large-scale network using distributed messaging servers.

It is now widely accepted that climate change will lead to intensification of the global hydrological cycle and will subsequently impact on regional water resources. Variability in climate conditions in Uganda is already having major impact on food security due to prolonged drought, high temperatures, floods and landslides that have lately been prevalent, especially in the northern region. This region has recorded consecutive years of crop failure and low livestock productivity due to erratic weather conditions and inadequate rainfall, which has impacted negatively on food security in the region with records of famine and hunger in some districts during the 2000s. With the smallest number of natural water resources, northern Uganda has been over-dependent on rainfall and ground water sources for its water requirements. Prolonged temperature increase is likely to exacerbate the problems of the already difficult water balance faced in the region and rainfall patterns have already started changing with precipitation being just above the evapotranspiration during the rainy season but the trend quickly reverses at the onset of the dry seasons. This paper aims to illustrate the practical applications of vulnerability assessment frameworks for rural settings in developing countries, based on an ongoing water harvesting project for rural smallholder farming systems in northern Uganda, whose main objective is to improve farm water management systems for enhanced agricultural productivity and poverty alleviation. This paper examines the applicability of vulnerability assessment frameworks and methodologies to such poverty-ridden rural settings in Uganda, which can be classified as a developing country. Participatory methods were used to collect data using a combination of adaptation and participatory tools from climate vulnerability and capacity analysis (CVCA) and community-based risk screening tools for adaptation and livelihoods (CRiSTAL) as decision support tools to analyse the vulnerability assessment. Results obtained by qualitative analysis show that there is high vulnerability to floods, HIV/AIDS, and anthropogenic activities, notably including civil wars and cattle rustling. The paper concludes that a combination of vulnerability assessment tools can give more rational and realistic results, and that efforts should be made to take stakeholder inputs into consideration while developing and applying the vulnerability assessment tools. It is recommended that vulnerability assessment tools for developing countries be standardised for ease of replication and applicability. KeywordsAdaptation planningClimate changeWater stressSmallholder farming systemsVulnerability frameworks

A contemporary approach to network vulnerability assessment

As the number of system vulnerabilities multiplies in recent years, vulnerability assessment has emerged as a powerful system security administration tool that can identify vulnerabilities in existing systems before they are exploited. Although there are many commercial vulnerability assessment tools in the market, none of them can formally guarantee that the assessment process never compromises the computer systems being tested. This paper proposes a featherweight virtual machine (FVM) technology to address the safety issue associated with vulnerability testing. Compared with other virtual machine technologies, FVM is designed to facilitate sharing between virtual machines but still provides strong protection between them. The FVM technology allows a vulnerability assessment tool to test an exact replica of a production-mode network service, including both hardware and system software components, while guaranteeing that the production-mode network service is fully isolated from the testing process. In addition to safety, the vulnerability assessment support system described in this paper can also automate the entire process of vulnerability testing and thus for the first time makes it feasible to run vulnerability testing autonomously and frequently. Experiments on a Windows-based prototype show that Nessus assessment results against an FVM virtual machine are identical to those against a real machine. Furthermore, modifications to the file system and registry state made by vulnerability assessment runs are completely isolated from the host machine. Finally, the performance impact of vulnerability assessment runs on production network services is as low as 3%.

The paper introduces a comprehensive and integrated tool developed to analyse socio-economic impacts of floods due to sea-level rise (SLR) on coastal cities, and presents the outcomes of a case study application in Bangkok, Thailand. The study aimed to capture a macro picture of floods to present an overview of the severity of flooding under the projected SLR conditions. A physically-based distributed flood model, which combines surface and river flow, was adopted to simulate the flood scenarios due to different magnitudes of sea-level rise. The input rainfalls and upstream boundary conditions of a worst-case flood event of 1995 were considered as the baseline for the modelling, based on the available records of rainfall and water-level data sets of the last three decades. The outcomes of the case study present a detailed picture of floods and their socio-economic impacts in Bangkok City under the worst projected SLR scenarios in the 21st century. The simulated results show that for baseline conditions of 1995, the overall inundation area in Bangkok may increase up to 26% in 2050 due to a SLR of 32 cm, and to 81% in 2100 due to 88 cm SLR, compared to the extent of flood inundation in 1995. The number of flood affected buildings is likely to increase by a factor of 1.5 in the 75 years from 2025 to 2100. Citation Dutta, D. (2011) An integrated tool for assessment of flood vulnerability of coastal cities to sea-level rise and potential socio-economic impacts: a case study in Bangkok, Thailand. Hydrol. Sci. J. 56(5), 805–823.

Chapter 3 - Vulnerability Assessment Tools

In recent years, WebAPIs are being published to allow external users to use Web services. On the other hand, the number of attacks that exploit WebAPI vulnerabilities is increasing. In order to prevent damage caused by abusing WebAPI vulnerabilities, the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) has published a guideline (OWASP API Security Top 10) describing the 10 vulnerabilities with the highest security risk in WebAPIs. However, the guideline does not describe the methods of attack and detailed countermeasures. Therefore, there are some vulnerabilities that are difficult to detect with existing WebAPI vulnerability assessment tools. In this paper, we propose a vulnerability assessment method that automatically obtains the WebAPI reference and repeatedly analyzes the requests through WebAPI and their responses. The proposed vulnerability assessment method will enable vulnerability assessment for vulnerability items that are difficult to be detected by existing vulnerability assessment tools among vulnerability items described in the guideline (OWASP API Security Top 10).

Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment (VA) tools for forest ecosystems and forest-dependent communities are important for making decisions and understanding the impact of climate change on both social and natural systems. However, the tools are poorly coordinated, making it difficult for policymakers to carry out VAs properly. The aim of this study was to analyze VA literature worldwide to find representative case studies in terms of methods and tools applied and which have been successful in performing VAs on forests and forest-dependent communities. All successful VA studies analyzed had common characteristics such as significant funding, data availability and technical capacity. An additional characteristic was the development of an integrated approach that considered the vulnerability of both ecosystems and communities by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. Community members and relevant stakeholders were significantly involved in a participatory process that concluded with the identification of adaptation measures. The case studies also revealed how policymakers need to choose suitable methods and tools to undertake efficient assessment of vulnerabilities. They need to consider several aspects of the VA process such as subject matter, availability of resources, time and scale.

An important part of the natural hazard’s risk management is the vulnerability assessment. There are many publications proposing different systems of indicators and tools for vulnerability assessment, but very few of them are dealing with the problem on community level. The study for municipality of Lom is carried out on the base of a framework for vulnerability assessment which includes the following important elements: hazard probability, exposure, sensitivity and coping capacity. In this paper we use the spatial dimensions of the areas prone to a particular climate hazard as an indicator for the level of exposure to this hazard. We introduce a measure for the system sensitivity as a function of hazard and exposure classes assigned to these areas. On the base of a system of indicators and scores for the hazard, exposure, sensitivity and capacity, is estimated a Vulnerability Index for municipality of Lom. The results from this case study show that implementation of the proposed Vulnerability Assessment Method provide reliable information for the level of vulnerability to ten climate hazards. It may be of use for different risk management purposes.

Severe earthquakes are considered as a major hazard with a potential to cause substantial physical losses, economic losses and casualties. At the same time due to population inversion, new settlements are compelled to find their space in higher earthquake-prone zones. The probability of such terrible earthquake events cannot be ruled out for the near future. It is, therefore, quantifying risk and developing strategies which are vital for the disaster mitigation. In this study, a general procedure of seismic vulnerability assessment based on the fragility function is presented. The fragility function corresponding to seismic performance of reinforced concrete frame is obtained and presented as tool for vulnerability assessment. The work presented here aims to direct a quick and simplistic approach towards vulnerability assessment of RC framed building with the help of fragility curves.

Nowadays, internet-based applications are widely deployed by enterprises; network security problems affect enterprises greatly. The high cost of computing and network resources brought by existing mainstream vulnerability assessment tools affects the running of application systems seriously. To solve problems mentioned above, the algorithm, framework and prototype system of evolution-based vulnerability assessment is proposed here. Components of the system are organized to comply with the subscriber/publisher architecture; the subscriber is responsible for system characteristics collecting while the publisher is responsible for vulnerability assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with other vulnerability assessment tools, the system is more efficiency, lower computing and network resources required, less affection on applications and applicable to large-scale computing network.