Recent orders
CLASS A EMERGENCY RESPONSE POLICY DISCUSSION
CLASS A: EMERGENCY RESPONSE POLICY DISCUSSION
Author’s Name
Subject
Date
If I were a special consultant, I would advise the governor to do three things to enable and empower remote communities with training and resources that are essential to responding effectively to disasters. I would do this through an open and transparent process involving public reviews and input. Firstly, I would appeal to the governor to implement community-based disaster enlightenment programs and commit to ensuring ease of access to learning resources as part of effective disaster response policies. This move would augment the community’s competency and abilities in disaster risk reduction (DRR), humanitarian work after disasters, and disaster preparedness and response. Secondly, I would advise the governor to create and fund community-oriented empowerment-enhancing initiatives and disaster safety practices. Then, he would move to engage local institutions of learning to collaborate in disseminating such practices and activities as an imperative policy component for sustainable community-centered disaster management. Lastly, I would advise the governor to initiate and deploy strategic disaster-oriented task forces and empower the community with resources to activate these task forces for enhanced disaster response.
Assuming that I am considering strategic- or executive-level policy, my recommendations on the policy requirements for the governor to adopt indicate that the best balance is between top-down and bottom-up approaches to disaster management policy. A balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches will enhance the chances of eliciting and achieving support under the current circumstances because it emphasizes community empowerment trough training and resource deployment. Community empowerment, along with training and keeping the community informed in disaster response policy are the key groundwork for attaining sound community resilience to disasters.
Bibliography
Plough, Alonzo, Jonathan E. Fielding, Anita Chandra, Malcolm Williams, David Eisenman, Kenneth B. Wells, Grace Y. Law, Stella Fogleman, and Aizita Magaña. “Building community disaster resilience: perspectives from a large urban county department of public health.” American Journal of Public Health 103, no. 7 (2013): 1190-1197.
Rajeev M. M. “Sustainability and community empowerment in disaster management.” International Journal of Social Work and Human Services Practice 2, no. 6 (2014): 207-212.
Win, Yin Mar Nay. “A study on disaster risk reduction and management in community (Case Study: Bilin Township, Thaton District, Mon State)” PhD diss., Yangon University of Economics, 2019, 1-45.
CLASS A DISCUSSION
CLASS A: DISCUSSION
Author’s Name
Subject
Date
The level of government I have chosen for this week’s discussion is the state government. In the context of state governments, an example of something I regard as an improvement to current disaster-associated policy transformations is the amendment of the Emergency Relief and Assistance Fund (ERAF) regulation that took effect in 2014. This amendment was a change in government response structure that enabled the creation of a useful sliding-scale framework in Vermont for sharing costs on the 17.5% of non-federal match requirements for public assistance grants offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after federally-declared disasters. The new policy change means that Vermont will contribute an additional 7.5% towards these costs, and also contribute 12.5% or 17.5% of entire cost to enable communities to be well prepared to lessen damage emanating from floods. I see it as a positive policy change because it encourages collaboration between state and federal governments in augmenting community financial resilience against disasters.
An example of something I consider not an improvement is the establishment of the Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire program or (C-PAW) program in 2015. It was created to advocate collaboration with the communities to lessen risks of wildfire disasters through improved planning of land utilization in different states. Specifically, the program provides technical assistance to these communities as regards integrating wildfire risk planning into their land use plans to ensure the management of building codes development and natural resources, hence reducing risks of wildfire disasters. I do not see this program as a policy improvement but as an additional program among many other wildfire programs established in the last two decades following collaborative action between state and federal governments in the area of wildfire disaster management.
Bibliography
Headwaters Economics. “Communities Utilize Land Use Planning to Reduce Wildfire Risks and Costs.” Available at https://headwaterseconomics.org/wildfire/solutions/cpaw/ (Accessed November 29, 2019).
Richards, Ryan. “Before the Fire: Protecting Vulnerable Communities from Wildfire.” (Center for American Progress, July 25, 2019). Available athttps://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2019/07/25/472639/before-the-fire/. (Accessed November 29, 2019).
Vermont Emergency Management.” 2018 Vermont State Hazard Mitigation Plan.” (Vermont: Vermont Emergency Management, 2018).
Vermont State Government. “Emergency Relief and Assistance Fund.” (Vermont: Vermont State Government, 2019). Available at https://floodready.vermont.gov/find_funding/emergency_relief_assistance. (Accessed November 29, 2019).
Class 643 Week 7
Class 643 Week 7
Author’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Class 643 Week 7
Petya and NotPetya have several differences the first of which is the XOR key used. The latter uses 0x07 as a key while the former uses 0x37 (Alvarez, 2017). Another difference is that Petya is a standard piece of ransomware that quickly targeted a few cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) victims while NotPetya is malware with many tools that enable it to spread in and infect computers (Fruhlinger, 2017). Thirdly, the two differ in their reboot style where Petya initiates the reboot process using NtRaiseHardError API while NotPetya utilizes the “shutdown.exe/r/f” command to schedule a reboot (Alvarez, 2017). These and other differences are significant to the growing cybersecurity field as it relates to infrastructure because they reflect the magnitude of damage and vulnerabilities that can arise from critical infrastructure interdependency in the event of ransomware or malware attacks (Macaulay, 2019).
In general, NotPetya differs from ransomware in that this malware is not an attempt to achieve financial gain via cyber ransom but rather infect computers and deny users the opportunity to decrypt and restore their systems. So, the likely motivation in this difference was data destruction where NotPetya encrypts users’ data and damages it beyond repair (Fruhlinger, 2017). The implications of the NotPetya attack for global transportation systems are that it caused major transportation disruptions at port facilities globally and borked the global transport and logistics supply chains (Macaulay, 2019; Saul, 2017). Had Maersk not acted promptly to recover so quickly from this attack by reinstalling and replacing its IT systems in 10 days, the implications would have been total catastrophic transportation disruptions worldwide. Some factors that could have made the NotPetya attack worse are unpatched computer systems and massive infrastructure interdependence. What could have been done to help prevent this attack is infrastructure separation so that an attack on one infrastructure sector does not affect all sectors.
References
Alvarez, R. (July 09, 2017). Key differences between Petya and NotPetya. Fortinet, Inc. Retrieved February 25, 2020, from https://www.fortinet.com/blog/threat-research/key-differences-between-petya-and-notpetya.html.
Fruhlinger, J. (October 17, 2017). Petya ransomware and NotPetya malware: What you need to know now. CSO & IDG Communications, Inc. Retrieved February 25, 2020, from https://www.csoonline.com/article/3233210/petya-ransomware-and-notpetya-malware-what-you-need-to-know-now.html.
Macaulay, T. (2019). The danger of critical infrastructure interdependency. Governing Cyberspace during a Crisis in Trust, 69-73.
Saul, J. (2017). Global shipping feels fallout from Maersk cyber attack. Thompson Reuters.