Critical Infrastructure Organizations Research Articles

Information modeling in Russia

According to a study by SearchInform for 2022, only 3% of systemically important enterprises and 1.7% of critical information infrastructure organizations replaced foreign operating systems (OS) and database management systems (DBMS) with domestic ones. This article examines the factors that may be the reason for such a low dynamics of import substitution at Russian enterprises, as well as the conditions under which the situation may change for the better.

How Did Corona Crisis Managers in Germany Make Sense of the Psychosocial Situation?

Alongside its immediate consequences for physical health, the current Coronavirus pandemic and the associated containment measures have led to multiple psychosocial consequences for the population. While virus containment is the main motive of crisis management, there is, so far, little evidence on how crisis management actors consider findings about the psychosocial state of the German population. This paper therefore examines the role of psychosocial consequences within the work of crisis management organizations during the Corona pandemic in Germany. Against the theoretical background of the sensemaking concept, 14 qualitative interviews were conducted with decision-makers from municipal and state administrations, public health departments, aid organizations, and critical infrastructure organizations. Our results indicate that crisis managers perceive aspects related to the psychosocial situation as relevant, but in a very selective way. They use different and often non-scientific sources to acquire knowledge about the psychosocial consequences. In sum, these aspects do not play a major role in decision-making processes. We argue that the perception and processing of psychosocial consequences depend in particular on the organizational context such as goals, plausibility assumptions, identity conceptions, and problem frames. In order to extend theoretical models of psychosocial crisis management, more detailed knowledge of sensemaking processes in crisis management organizations is necessary.

Мethod of analysis for analyzing phishing messages

The development and widespread introduction of the Internet into everyday life has transformed both economic and social relations. The representation of these relations in digital form has created a digital economy, characterized by an active exchange of information, quick access to information resources, and the transfer of payments to the digital dimension. Social relations in the digital world are represented by social networks, instant messengers, which also provide economic services. At the same time, the new space, the transformed economy and social relations give rise to new threats. Users themselves actively expose information about themselves and their loved ones, photos of vacations and locations to the public. In addition to social networking, viewing entertainment content and online games, bank settlement transactions are popular. The popularization of Internet banking leads to an increased interest in stealing data from intruders. The result of this is an increase in the number of scammers who aim to obtain confidential user information. In addition, since the beginning of the war, the number of cyber attacks on public authorities, critical information infrastructure facilities and organizations containing critical information has increased. One of the well-known methods of stealing such information is phishing attacks. At the same time, most users underestimate the severity of these attacks and do not pay enough attention to protection systems. This, in turn, leads to wider consequences. Therefore, the problem to be solved is to present a method for analyzing phishing messages that can be used to reduce the probability of reaching the goal of a phishing attack. At the same time, it is known that attackers improve and modify the methods of implementing attacks, and therefore, classifying phishing attacks to increase user awareness is an urgent task. The result of the work is the proposed classification of phishing attacks and the presented method for analyzing phishing messages.

A Framework for creating a Safety and Security Management System (SSMS)

Safety and security risks to critical infrastructure organizations are well known, and incidents in both fields have taken place. To help critical infrastructure organizations manage these areas, safety and security standards have been created. The main aim of this paper is to present a framework that has been created to manage both safety and security by providing guidance on how to create a Safety and Security Management System (SSMS). The framework identifies and remediates conflicts and issues between IT, OT, safety, and security. While also creating processes that can combine safety and security compliance to standards to reduce duplication of work and allow one process to manage both areas. A survey was carried out to understand if the framework would be of use to organizations and to better understand the issues users have with managing safety and security and how they manage conflicts that can occur. The survey showed key areas of concern for organizations and how the framework can be of use to them. It identified six themes from the research and identified improvements opportunities for the framework that can be implemented.

Secure software development: industrial practice - a review

The current state of application assets with respect to their development, functionality, scalability, user friendliness, and compatibility with legacy systems has witnessed an unprecedented degree of positive improvements. This induced increase in productivity and value has been a product of the technological innovations within and around the software development landscape. Owing to specific software development practices including software reusability, Object Oriented Programming (OOP), encapsulation, and portability, all sectors of the economy have come to embrace software products that have helped to drive business transactions. Nonetheless, the proliferation of software which has driven up the velocity, veracity and volume of data associated with transactions has become a goldmine for grabs. Hackers and adversaries alike have thus capitalized on this development to exploit the potential threats and vulnerabilities associated with software products. Insecure software is global issue, and one that impacts individuals, organizations and governments. Data loss is both a security and privacy issue, with compliance, regulatory and legal concerns, and bad actors are relentless in their efforts to steal, deface, alter/manipulate, destroy, and compromise software systems. Organizations should therefore embrace secure code principles, threat modeling, and institute a Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC) practice that will aid the embedment of security into the development phase, to contain the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities that are inherent in software development. This paper demonstrates an effort to provide and arm organizations with the necessary tools, processes, and mechanisms that can be leveraged to combat cyber-threats and enforce Information Assurance (IA) within and around enterprise application assets. Beginning with an overview of the contemporary software development practices witnessed in diverse organizations, including financial, energy, aviation, commerce, nuclear, defense, and several other Critical Infrastructure (CI) organizations, the tenets of a composite, structured and robust. SSDLC has been presented to promote a defense-in-depth security for enterprise organizations.

Barriers towards Resilient Performance among Public Critical Infrastructure Organizations: The Refugee Influx Case of 2015 in Sweden

During the autumn of 2015, Europe experienced a sharp increase in refugee influx, and many refugees arrived in the European Øresund Region. Refugees travelled through Denmark and over the Øresund Bridge, arriving in the third largest city in Sweden, Malmö. Private, public and voluntary organizations in Malmö had to change the way they worked to meet the new entry demands. Flexible adaptations to changing circumstances can be described as resilient performance and are supported or hindered by societal and organizational drivers and barriers. Qualitative interview data from Swedish organizations managing the refugee reception in Malmö were analyzed through the theoretical lens of Resilience Engineering (RE). The analysis results showed that necessary adaptations were not supported by the managerial design of the responsible public organizations. The analysis also showed that preconditions created from societal steering hinders value responsiveness at the public management level, i.e., the public management level has barriers towards becoming familiar with the organization’s value structures. Familiarity with the system value and goal structure is essential for an efficient prioritizing of conflicting goals, which is why it is suggested that this aspect be explicitly included in RE principles.

Approaches, Successes, and Challenges in Recruiting Closed Points of Dispensing Sites: A Qualitative Study.

Closed points of dispensing (PODs) are an essential component of local public health preparedness programs because most local public health agencies lack the infrastructure to distribute medical countermeasures to all community members in a short period of time through open PODs alone. However, no study has examined closed POD recruitment strategies or approaches to determine best practices, such as how to select or recruit an agency, group, or business to become a closed POD site once a potential partner has been identified. We conducted qualitative interviews with US disaster planners to identify their approaches and challenges to recruiting closed POD sites. In total, 16 disaster planners participated. Recruitment considerations related to selecting sites, paperwork needed, and challenges faced in recruiting closed POD sites. Important selection criteria for sites included size, agencies or businesses with vulnerable or confined populations who lack access or ability to get to or through open POD sites, and critical infrastructure organizations. Major challenges to recruitment included difficulty convincing sites of closed POD importance, obstacles with recruiting sites that can administer mass vaccination, and fear of legal repercussions related to medical countermeasure dispensing or administration. Closed POD recruitment is a frequently challenging but highly necessary process both before and during the current pandemic. These recommendations can be used by other disaster planners intending to start or expand their closed POD network. Public health agencies should continue working toward improved distribution plans for medical countermeasures, both oral and vaccine, to minimize morbidity and mortality during mass casualty events.

Cyber Situational Awareness and Information Sharing in Critical Infrastructure Organizations

Cyber Situational Awareness and Information Sharing in Critical Infrastructure Organizations

Information security governance practices in critical infrastructure organizations: A socio-technical and institutional logic perspective

Achieving a sustainable information protection capability within complex business, legal and technical environments is an integral part of supporting an organization’s strategic and compliance objectives. Despite a growing focus on information security governance (ISG) it remains under-explored requiring greater empirical scrutiny and more contextually attuned theorizing. This study adopts an interpretive case approach and uses analytical lenses drawing from socio-technical systems and institutional logics to examine how ISG arrangements are framed and shaped in practice in fourteen Australian Critical Infrastructure Organizations. Our findings illustrate the heterogeneity and malleability of ISG across different organizations involving intra- and inter-organizational relationships and trust mechanisms. We identify the need to reframe ISG, adopting the new label information protection governance (IPG), to present a more multi-faceted view of information protection incorporating a richly layered set of social and technical aspects, that constitute and are constituted by governance arrangements.