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Author(s):
Jessie Walker Byron J. Williams Gordon W. Skelton
Conference Name
IEEE
Abstract

Cyber security continues to be an increasingly important topic when considering Homeland Security issues. This area however is often overlooked during a disaster or emergency situation. Emergency management within the US as it currently stands lacks any real cyber situational awareness with respect to the core activities of emergency management such as mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. As a result critical cyberinfrastructure resources that emergency management personnel rely on is left on the sideline when planning, handling, and recovering from emergencies or natural disasters. As emergency management evolves within the US to handle dynamic man-made, and natural disasters such as terrorist attacks, hurricanes, and floods, these issues must be addressed to mitigate risks. This paper takes the first step in examining the issue of cyber situational awareness within emergency management and identifies several concerns for the emergency management community.

Concluding remarks
In this paper, we discussed several cyber security concerns for the EM community. Each set of EM tasks has its own unique implementation concern and characteristics. Many of the EM tasks listed in this paper demonstrate a clear pattern of duplication of cyber security concerns for the entire EM community. Most EM researchers agree that there is no real killer solution to integrate in cyber situational awareness for the EM community but instead there is a real need for standards to be integrated into the EM paradigm as it currently stands. This is evident from the cyber security concerns described in this paper. Hence this lack of coherent knowledge offers many opportunities for further research into how to guide EM community to a framework that integrates in cyber situational awareness and develops an appreciation for cyber security concerns for each particular task within the domain of EM.

Reference details

DOI
10.1109/THS.2010.5654965
Resource type
Conference Proceedings
Year of Conference
2010
Publication Area
Civilian cybersecurity
Date Published
2010-11

How to cite this reference:

Walker, J., Williams, B. J., & Skelton, G. W. (2010). Cyber security for emergency management. https://doi.org/10.1109/THS.2010.5654965 (Original work published)