Critical Infrastructure Resources Research Articles

Regulating Cyber Threats in the Financial Services Industry: Chapter 3

Three critical questions are outlined in this chapter. First, what are cyber risks and how do these risks affect the capital and credit markets, national securities, commodities and derivatives exchanges, banking and payments systems as well as other systemically important financial intermediary services? Second, if financial markets are a critical infrastructure resource that resemble a kind of commons might cyber risks be understood as systemic risks? If cyber risks constitute systemic risks, what impact might these risks have on financial markets? Finally, have proposed solutions effectively mitigated the systemic risk concerns that cyber risks engender? This chapter outlines principles governing the development of cyber risk regulation. It focuses, however, on hackers and others who seek to disrupt securities and commodities exchanges, banking institutions, and payment systems. Because these businesses are publicly traded companies competing in capital markets to attract investors, it is unlikely that these institutions will be motivated to reveal risk exposures if the sole reward is protecting the public good. This chapter evaluates the contributions of industry-initiated and federal agency-proposed solutions to the growing cyber risks that threaten domestic and international financial institutions.

Application of a generic bow-tie based risk analysis framework on risk management of sea ports and offshore terminals

Ports and offshore terminals are critical infrastructure resources and play key roles in the transportation of goods and people. With more than 80 percent of international trade by volume being carried out by sea, ports and offshore terminals are vital for seaborne trade and international commerce. Furthermore in today's uncertain and complex environment there is a need to analyse the participated risk factors in order to prioritise protective measures in these critically logistics infrastructures. As a result of this study is carried out to support the risk assessment phase of the proposed Risk Management (RM) framework used for the purpose of sea ports and offshore terminals operations and management (PTOM). This has been fulfilled by integration of a generic bow-tie based risk analysis framework into the risk assessment phase as a backbone of the phase. For this reason Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Event Tree Analysis (ETA) are used to analyse the risk factors associated within the PTOM. This process will eventually help the port professionals and port risk managers to investigate the identified risk factors more in detail. In order to deal with vagueness of the data Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) and possibility approach are used to overcome the disadvantages of the conventional probability based approaches.

Disaster risk management for critical infrastructure: a services-based viewpoint

It is necessary to protect critical infrastructure and key resources from the effects of a disaster in order to maintain continuity of both public services and private enterprise. Since many of the critical resources are themselves privately owned and operated, however, they are often subject to the same market pressures that force businesses to concentrate on improving the efficiency of their operations at the possible expense of guarding against potential disruptions to those operations. Under these circumstances, the process of designing an effective (and acceptable) disaster mitigation plan for critical infrastructure resources requires a shared understanding of both the business aspects and the technical aspects of different mitigation alternatives. This paper examines the decision-making process behind such disaster mitigation planning from a services standpoint and discusses how taking such a viewpoint can provide a more effective approach to sustainable disaster risk reduction.