skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Determining the Impact of Cybersecurity Failures During and Attributable to Pandemics and Other Emergency Situations
In emergency situations, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, less immediate concerns such as cybersecurity and long-term economic impact can fall by the wayside. This paper presents a discussion of the impact of cybersecurity issues that occur during and are attributable to pandemics and other emergency situations. This discussion is facilitated by a simulation tool, the Disaster Vulnerability Threat and Impact Simulator System (DVTISS). DVTISS simulates the network structure, security measures, user characteristics and demographics, data, and devices of an organization or region’s computing infrastructure. The system is provided input parameters and performs analysis to identify the combined results of numerous different decisions, which are made in concert, to identify the types of vulnerabilities that may be present and the impact of their exploitation. The impacts of system unavailability are considered. This can aid businesses, governments and others in determining the level of prioritization that should be given to cybersecurity considerations. The simulator can also be used for disaster preparedness and planning, evaluating particular response strategies and the evaluation of laws and policies that impact IT decision making during emergencies. This paper uses the DVTISS tool to consider organizational responses to several example emergency situations. It demonstrates the utility of the tool as well as its efficacy for decision making support. Based on the example emergencies, the paper also discusses key areas of vulnerability during emergency situations and their financial, data and system outage impacts. © 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1757659
PAR ID:
10223347
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition Workshop
ISSN:
2164-2516
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management - ISCRAM 2020)
    During emergencies, it is often necessary to evacuate vulnerable people to safer places to reduce loss of lives and cope with human suffering. Shelters are publically available places to evacuate, especially for people who do not have any other choices. This paper overviews emergency shelter planning in disaster mitigation and preparation and discusses the need for better responding to people who need to evacuate during emergencies. Recent evacuation studies pay attention to integrating social factors into evacuation modeling for better prediction of evacuation decisions. Our goal is to address the impact of social behavior on the sheltering choices of evacuees and to explore the potential contributions of including social network characteristics in the decision-making process of authorities. We present the shelter utilization problem in South Carolina during Hurricane Florence and discuss an agent-based modeling approach that considers social community structures in modeling the shelter choice behavior of socially connected individuals 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, Proceedings of the 19th ISCRAM Conference)
    In addition to their normal task of supporting community participation, engagement, and improved information access, information technology-based public service systems are also essential for maintaining critical services and providing effective communication with citizens before, during, and after emergencies. This study focuses on the impacts of disaster events on the operational performance of such service systems and discusses opportunities for managing service efficiency by rearranging and reallocating resources during emergencies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide a practical method for improving the relative efficiency of public service systems in such a context. We suggest a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach for quantifying the relative efficiencies associated with service requests from an input-output-based standpoint, and discuss the Orange County (Florida) 311 non-emergency service system, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as an example of how such operational efficiency can be managed during a disruption. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; (, Electronic Imaging)
    During active shooter events or emergencies, the ability of security personnel to respond appropriately to the situation is driven by pre-existing knowledge and skills, but also depends upon their state of mind and familiarity with similar scenarios. Human behavior becomes unpredictable when it comes to making a decision in emergency situations. The cost and risk of determining these human behavior characteristics in emergency situations is very high. This paper presents an immersive collaborative virtual reality (VR) environment for performing virtual building evacuation drills and active shooter training scenarios using Oculus Rift head mounted displays. The collaborative immersive environment is implemented in Unity 3D and is based on run, hide, and fight mode for emergency response. The immersive collaborative VR environment also offers a unique method for training in emergencies for campus safety. The participant can enter the collaborative VR environment setup on the cloud and participate in the active shooter response training environment, which leads to considerable cost advantages over large-scale real-life exercises. A presence questionnaire in the user study was used to evaluate the effectiveness of our immersive training module. The results show that a majority of users agreed that their sense of presence was increased when using the immersive emergency 
    more » « less
  4. (, Proceedings of the IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging (EI 2022), in the Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality)
    Active shooter events are not emergencies that can be reasonably anticipated. However, these events do occur more than we think, and there is a critical need for an effective emergency preparedness plan that can increase the likelihood of saving lives and reducing casualties in the event of an active shooting incident. There has been a major concern about the lack of tools available to allow for modeling and simulation of human behavior during emergency response training. Over the past few decades, virtual reality-based training for emergency response and decision making has been recognized as a novel alternative for disaster preparedness. This paper presents an immersive virtual reality (VR) training module for active shooter events for a building emergency response. There are two immersive active shooter modules developed: occupant’s module and Security personnel module. We have developed an immersive virtual reality training module for active shooter events using an Oculus for the course of action, visualization, and situational awareness for active shooter events. The immersive environment is implemented in Unity 3D where the user has an option to enter the environment as security personnel or as an occupant in the building. The immersive VR training module offers a unique platform for emergency response and decision making training. The platform allows for collecting data on different what-if scenarios in response to active shooter events that impact the actions of security personnel and occupants in a building. The data collected can be used to educate security personnel on how to reduce response times. Moreover, security personnel can be trained to respond to a variety of emergencies safely and securely without ever being exposed to real-world dangers. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings Winter Simulation Conference)
    The New York City (NYC) youth shelter system provides housing, counseling, and other support services to runaway and homeless youth and young adults (RHY). These resources reduce RHY's vulnerability to human trafficking, yet most shelters are unable to meet demand. This paper presents a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model of a crisis-emergency and drop-in center for LGBTQ+ youth in NYC, which aims to analyze the current operations and test potential capacity expansion interventions. The model uses data from publicly available resources and interviews with service providers and key stakeholders. The simulated shelter has 66 crisis-emergency beds, offers five different support services, and serves on average 1,399 LGBTQ+ RHY per year. The capacity expansion interventions examined in this paper are adding crisis-emergency beds and psychiatric therapists. This application of DES serves as a tool to communicate with policymakers, funders, and service providers-potentially having a strong humanitarian impact. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email