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.

This report provides a brief overview of legacy avionics and the air traffic control system (ATS), describes the current Next Generation (NextGEN) ATS, the integrated modular avionics (IMA) of modern aircraft, and provide a list of potential cyber security (CS) issues and associated CS anectodotes/incidents. An overview of the civilian/commercial aviation industry regulatory framework and introduced CS measures and solutions are summarized. Finally, some short concluding remarks and discuss the relevance of aviation CS to nuclear CS are provided.

Industry 4.0 is a blend of the hyper-connected digital industry within two world of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT). With this amalgamate opportunity, smart manufacturing involves production assets with the manufacturing equipment having its own intelligence, while the system-wide intelligence is provided by the cyber layer. However Smart manufacturing now becomes one of the prime targets of cyber threats due to vulnerabilities in the existing process of operation. Since smart manufacturing covers a vast area of production industries from cyber physical system to additive manufacturing, to autonomous vehicles, to cloud based IIoT (Industrial IoT), to robotic production, cyber threat stands out with this regard questioning about how to connect manufacturing resources by network, how to integrate a whole process chain for a factory production etc. Cybersecurity confidentiality, integrity and availability expose their essential existence for the proper operational thread model known as digital thread ensuring secure manufacturing. In this work, a literature survey is presented from the existing threat models, attack vectors and future challenges over the digital thread of smart manufacturing.

A critical requirement for developing a cyber capable workforce is to understand how to challenge, assess, and rapidly develop human cyber skill-sets in realistic cyber operational environments. Fortunately, cyber team competitions make use of simulated operational environments with scoring criteria of task performance that objectively define overall team effectiveness, thus providing the means and context for observation and analysis of cyber teaming. Such competitions allow researchers to address the key determinants that make a cyber defense team more or less effective in responding to and mitigating cyber attacks. For this purpose, we analyzed data collected at the 12th annual Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC, http://www.maccdc.org/), where eight teams were evaluated along four independent scoring dimensions: maintaining services, incident response, scenario injects, and thwarting adversarial activities. Data collected from the 13-point OAT (Observational Assessment of Teamwork) instrument by embedded observers and a cyber teamwork survey completed by all participants were used to assess teamwork and leadership behaviors and team composition and work processes, respectively. The scores from the competition were used as an outcome measure in our analysis to extract key features of team process, structure, leadership, and skill-sets in relation to effective cyber defense. We used Bayesian regression to relate scored performance during the competition to team skill composition, team experience level, and an observational construct of team collaboration. Our results indicate that effective collaboration, experience, and functional role-specialization within the teams are important factors that determine the success of these teams in the competition and are important observational predictors of the timely detection and effective mitigation of ongoing cyber attacks. These results support theories of team maturation and the development of functional team cognition applied to mastering cybersecurity.

We present a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on CTI mining from multiple data sources in this article. Specifically, we provide and devise a taxonomy to summarize the studies on CTI mining based on the intended purposes (i.e., cybersecurity-related entities and events, cyber attack tactics, techniques and procedures, profiles of hackers, indicators of compromise, vulnerability exploits and malware implementation, and threat hunting), along with a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art. Lastly, we discuss research challenges and possible future research directions for CTI mining.

This paper brings out a comparative assessment of cyber threats in the G4 Nations which are emerging economies and at higher risk of cyber-attacks. The paper gives an overview of the state of cyber threats and response strategies of G4 Nations. This study focuses mainly on the factors which makes them vulnerable targets of such attacks as well as on the impact assessment of such attacks on these economies. While the impacts of these threats cannot be over emphasized, recommendations were proposed on how these threats can be minimized if not totally eliminated.

According to sources interviewed for this research, a model for
assessing this maturity employed by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and US Department of Defense is being proposed to the Government of Japan (Abraham’s interviews and pers. comm., 6 June 2019).

State and non-state actors are increasingly using cyberspace as a platform to execute hybrid warfare. As multiple incidents in India have shown critical infrastructures, particularly nuclear infrastructures, have been lucrative targets of cyber-attacks. Considering India’s well-progressing civilian and military nuclear infrastructures, it is apposite to raise the question of how safe these nuclear infrastructures are from cyber threats. This article suggests that India’s nuclear infrastructures will remain exposed to cyber-attacks due to their strategic significance for India’s national security. These threats will continue to exploit the zero-day vulnerabilities in the cyber-physical systems of these infrastructures. Further, the article looks into the threat sources, consequences and mitigation strategies against cyber-attacks on nuclear infrastructures. In an attempt to explore mitigation strategies, the article discusses certain cyber-attack scenarios and the consequences on India’s nuclear infrastructures. The article concludes that while certain technological cyber-defence mechanisms are in place, there is a need for legislative and diplomatic measures for developing a comprehensive set of measures to deter cyber threats to India’s nuclear infrastructures. © 2022 SAGE Publications.

This paper discusses the basic concept of cybersecurity and with a detailed review of recent cybersecurity attacks from January 2020 to March 2021 with a detailed analysis of motivation behind such attacks, attack techniques used, and targets of the attacks. This paper will also discuss cloud breaches, data breaches, and leaky buckets which have increased from 2021. The paper will discuss the types of cyber attacks, attack types, and targets of those attacks.

The advent of cyber warfare exacerbates the risk of inadvertent nuclear escalation in a conventional conflict. In theory, cyber espionage and cyberattacks could enhance one state's ability to undermine another's nuclear deterrent. Regardless of how effective such operations might prove in practice, fear of them could generate escalatory “use-‘em-before-you-lose-‘em” pressures.Additionally, cyber threats could create three qualitatively new mechanisms by which a nuclear-armed state might incorrectly conclude that its nuclear deterrent was under attack. First, cyber espionage could be mistaken for a cyberattack. Second, malware could accidentally spread from systems that supported non-nuclear operations to nuclear-related systems. Third, an operation carried out by a third party could be misattributed by one state in a bilateral confrontation to its opponent. Two approaches to risk reduction are potentially viable in the short term: unilateral restraint in conducting potentially escalatory cyber operations, and bilateral or multilateral behavioral norms.