Emergent vulnerabilities in Integrated Operations: A proactive simulation study of economic risk

Abstract The protection of critical infrastructure requires an understanding of the effects of change on current and future safety and operations. Vulnerabilities may emerge during the rollout of updated techniques and integration of new technology with existing work practices. Managers need to understand how their decisions, often focused on economic priorities, affect the dynamics of vulnerability over time. Such understanding is difficult to obtain, as the historical data typically used for decision support, prediction and forecasting may not be available. We report on the use of group model building and simulation to consider proactively the effects of a 10-year, multi-billion dollar mo…

Vulnerability Black Markets: Empirical Evidence and Scenario Simulation

This paper discusses the manifest characteristics of online Vulnerability Black Markets (VBM), insider actors, interactions and mechanisms, obtained from masked observation. Because VBM transactions are hidden from general view, we trace their precursors as secondary evidence of their development and activity. More general attributes of VBMs and the exploits they discuss are identified. Finally, we introduce a simulation model that captures how vulnerability discoveries may be placed in a dual legal-black market context. We perform simulations and find that if legal markets expose vulnerabilities that go unresolved, the security and quality of software may suffer more than in the absence of…

Improving the Crisis to Crisis Learning Process

While crises may appear to be event-driven, post-mortem accounts often identify factors that accumulate over time and increase the likelihood of failure. These factors are particularly difficult to anticipate when multiple organizations are involved in crisis preparation and event detection. Through the development of a systems-based model of crisis management, it was learned that knowledge sharing can be accelerated or inhibited by the development of trust among organizations through the management of events. Is it possible to operationalize this finding? This hypothesis is one of the findings of the SEMPOC project, which examined crisis preparation and mitigation in the hypothetical conte…

Environmental Management Maturity: The Role of Dynamic Validation

Maturity models enhance the performance of companies by prescribing a trajectory through stages of increasing capability. However, a recent review of maturity models concludes that current maturity models hardly meet the design principles required for prescriptive use. To address this deficiency, we conducted semistructured interviews and a Group Model Building study with industrial companies in Spain in which we studied the progression toward a Leading Green Company as the highest maturity stage of environmental management. The findings from the study were tested using surveys with enterprises in Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom, semistructured interviews in the United Kingdom and cas…

Introduction to Emerging Risks and Systemic Concerns in Information Security Research and Applications Minitrack