Cartooning COVID-19 on facebook

Mike Asukwo's brightly textured cartoons captured the colorless realities of the Covid pandemic in Nigeria and circulated along with global pandemic discourses as local visual archives of Nigeria's postcolonial disenchantment. Social media is particularly central to the aesthetic value of Asukwo's political cartoons in producing and constraining the expression of civic agency among Nigerians. His cartoons demonstrate how everyday media practices such as the decoding and reproduction of popular culture texts online can challenge hierarchical systems of control. This chapter examines the conditions under which cultural netizens like Asukwo and his online audience make sense of the state's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting how Nigeria's crisis of infrastructure manifests in cartoons to accentuate the messiness of political leadership. The chapter concludes on the ambivalent valences of the social web and the digital public sphere it fosters, underscoring how social media documents the pandemic perspectives of members of the digital class in Nigeria. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.

The three A's of social capital in crises: Challenges with the availability, accessibility and activatability of social support

Social capital has become a major factor for analysing vulnerabilities and resilience in the context of disaster studies in recent years. Usually, it is studied along its three forms of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital, and it is often framed as a static characteristic that a person either has at his or her disposal or not. Based on the results of case studies conducted in Germany and Estonia focusing on four different crises (floods in Germany;long-term disruption of electricity due to a major storm in Estonia;a cyber-attack in Estonia;as well as the COVID-19 pandemic in both countries) we claim that this description and analysis of social capital does not allow for a comprehensive understanding of all the challenges disaster management has to deal with to decrease vulnerabilities and increase resilience. Using qualitative content analysis, we present a heuristic framework which not only asks whether bonding, bridging, and linking social capital is available to individuals, but also whether social capital is accessible and activatable when responding to or recovering from a disaster. In doing so, the paper helps to improve the overall usability of official or unofficial social support to cope with crises.

Pandemic response in the energy sector and impacts for infrastructure resilience management

Covid-19 highlighted shortcomings in the ability of critical infrastructure organisations to manage and operate their systems and assets. While the possibility of a pandemic was not unknown, management protocols fell short of preparing for this 'tail-risk' scenario. This paper assesses organisational response to the global pandemic and what this reveals in terms of (a) attitudes towards risks that do not typically manifest as operational priorities to address and (b) the implications for organisational resilience. Covid-19 impact management strategies developed by critical infrastructure organisations and their potential implications on wider risks and management capabilities are reviewed. The complex and evolving nature of critical infrastructure system management is demonstrated through examples of risk interconnectivity and resource scarcity. For example, the pandemic did not directly impact physical infrastructure, yet cascading issues are revealed that relate to the forced delay of planned asset maintenance and the impacts of supply chain disruptions. This paper demonstrates the need for holistic, multi-hazard management approaches in critical infrastructure organisations to ensure a level of operational resilience that is required for the twenty-first century. This paper also views critical infrastructure organisations as sociotechnical entities and highlights how building a resilience-oriented working culture can support effective risk planning and investment decisions. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers: Engineering Sustainability is the property of Thomas Telford Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Operationalizing Resiliency among Childcare Providers during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Childcare, a critical infrastructure, played an important role to create community resiliency during the COVID-19 pandemic. By finding pathways to remain open, or rapidly return to operations, the adaptive capacity of childcare providers to offer care in the face of unprecedented challenges functioned to promote societal level mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic impacts, to assist families in their personal financial recoveries, and to provide consistent, caring, and meaningful educational experiences for society's youngest members. This paper assesses the operational adaptations of childcare centers as a key resource and critical infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Greater Rochester, NY metropolitan region. Our findings evaluate the policy, provider mitigation, and response actions documenting the challenges they faced and the solutions they innovated. Implications for this research extend to climate-induced disruptions, including fires, water shortages, electric grid cyberattacks, and other disruptions where extended stay-at-home orders or service critical interventions are implemented. © 2022 IEEE.

Shifting towards Antifragile Critical Infrastructure Systems

Antifragility, which is an evolutionary understanding of resilience, has become a predominant concept in academic and industrial fields as the criticality of vital infrastructures (like healthcare and transportation) has become more flexible and varying due the impact of digitization and adverse circumstances, such as changing the prioritization of industrial services while accelerating IoT (Internet of Things) deployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crucial role of antifragility is to enable critical infrastructures to gain from disorder to foster their adaptability to real unexpected environmental changes. Thus, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the antifragility concept while clarifying the difference with the resilience concept. Moreover, it highlights how the COVID-19 crisis has revealed the fragility of critical infrastructures and unintentionally promoted the antifragility concept. To showcase the main concepts, we adopt the blockchain as an example of an antifragile system. Copyright © 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

Omicron exposes critical infrastructure dependencies in Australia

Covid 19 / Omicron has caused high levels of absenteeism among the workforce. While the impact on the supply chain is being acknowledged, risks to the stability of critical infrastructure systems are not. The mutual inter-dependencies of complex systems such as power, transport and internet need to be better understood. © 2022 The Author(s).

Increasing vaccine uptake among employees within the non-health related critical infrastructure sectors: A review.

This review aimed to identify barriers to employee vaccination, motivators for vaccination, and vaccine uptake strategies within the critical infrastructure sectors. We focused on non-healthcare-related sectors, including food and agriculture, manufacturing, and education where employee vaccination is rarely mandated. We conducted a search for literature published from 2012 to 2022 from MEDLINE-PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science Core Collection, which resulted in 22 studies that met the inclusion criteria. We found that 1) barriers to vaccination differ by infectious disease and population; 2) common motivators for vaccination were about protecting self, family, and community; and 3) common uptake strategies for influenza (which accounted for 83% of uptake strategies in reviewed studies) addressed convenience and confidence barriers such as vaccination cost and education. Our review highlights the need for employers, policymakers, and researchers to identify infectious disease and population-specific barriers to vaccination and implement strategies aimed at addressing the identified barriers.

Assessing the agile approach to critical infrastructure in the light of primary research

Critical infrastructures have received increasing attention in recent years. One of the main reasons for this over the past two years or so has been the pandemic of the coronavirus and its aftermath, which has required stability but also rapid response and effective management of change to ensure smooth operations. The agile approach, which has its origins in software development, offers precisely these benefits when applied. © 2022 IEEE.

Maintaining critical infrastructure resilience to natural hazards during the COVID-19 pandemic: hurricane preparations by US energy companies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to compromise the ability of critical infrastructure utilities to respond to or mitigate natural hazards like wildfires and hurricanes. This article describes the ways that an energy organization, the regional transmission operator PJM, is preparing for hurricanes during the COVID-19 pandemic. PJM is using a combination of technological and organizational processes to prepare for hurricanes during the pandemic. Activities include the development of a third control room to increase redundancy and maintaining social distance at control center, investment in more resilient communications technology to maintain connectivity, and taking a holistic approach to identifying issues related to supply chain and fuel security. With this mix of organizational and technological processes, we argue that critical infrastructure resilience should be understood as a sociotechnical construct and identify several recommendations for improving resilience. The article has implications for policymakers working to maintain infrastructure resilience to natural hazards during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The emergence of new critical infrastructures. Is the COVID-19 pandemic shifting our perspective on what critical infrastructures are?

Our modern world is highly dependent on the functioning of a complex system of interdependent infrastructures. Failure of one infrastructure can have severe and far-reaching impacts on other infrastructures and jeopardize the functioning of the whole system. While certain infrastructures have been considered highly critical and their dependencies and protection has been addressed extensively and for decades, others have been considered less or not at all critical and have been barely debated. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented strain on infrastructure systems and has revealed that different infrastructures become highly critical throughout an ongoing and long-lasting crisis than during a sudden but short-term crisis. This paper investigates the representation of critical infrastructure dependency descriptions in the literature before and since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this qualitative study, the quantity of descriptions per critical infrastructure dependency is analyzed and visualized and used to discuss the perception of how critical those infrastructures are. The study revealed that new infrastructures have been identified as critical in recent literature and that the focus was shifted to specific infrastructures that were in more pressing need during the pandemic. This shift of focus was observed to happen from the sectors of energy, water, transport & traffic, and ICT before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to the sectors public health, constitutional institutions, transport & traffic, and food since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, analysis of the literature revealed infrastructures which had previously not been classified as critical, being discussed as new critical infrastructures. Urban green spaces, for example, have proven to be essential for the health and well-being of citizens during lockdown times. Further, social services like childcare, care of the elderly, delivery services, and online grocery shopping have been highlighted as essential services for maintaining workforces and the functioning of society during a pandemic. Overall, the analysis of descriptions of critical infrastructure dependencies before and since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed changes in the focus on critical infrastructures and in the perception of what makes critical infrastructures critical.

An overview of the infrastructure seismic resilience assessment using Artificial Intelligence and Machine-learning algorithms

The concept of resilience is increasingly attracting attention, specifically after the recent Covid-19 pandemic. In the context of seismic threat, the infrastructure seismic resilience is essential to keep the functionality of critical infrastructure and emergency departments during the occurrence of the disastrous earthquake event and aims to recover them quickly afterward. To achieve these targets, lots of preparation ahead are necessary, and prediction analysis of the great number of scenarios for damage and recovery needs to be simulated, compared, and analyzed to offer optimal resilient infrastructure designs and retrofitting. To perform these actions, several studies have used different technics such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and machine learning (ML) techniques. These technics, moreover, have gained a rapid increase in the last years. This paper aims to review the available concepts of AI and ML techniques while used for seismic infrastructure resilience context, specifically in its four major analysis components i.e., hazards, damage, losses, and recovery. Limitations are discussed and recommendations are finally offered. This analysis can inspire future researchers by exploring the overall characteristics of the published literature. © 2022, National Technical University of Athens. All rights reserved.

Resilience stress testing for critical infrastructure

Critical infrastructure is vulnerable to systemic long-term stressors such as climate change, as well as shocks from extreme weather events, economic disruptions, and cyber failures. The complexity and interdependencies across critical infrastructure domains makes it susceptible to cascading failures, with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is the most recent example of disruptions in supply chains, healthcare and emergency facilities. Stress testing offers a conceptual framework and methodology for identifying risks associated with cascading failures and selecting mitigation and recovery strategies. This paper reviews the fundamentals of stress-testing science and practice in different fields (medicine, engineering, economics) and identifies challenges associated with the application of existing methodologies to infrastructure systems. The currently practiced risk-based stress testing approaches may only be of limited use because they merely aim to identify the components of failing systems by varying stress loads. Adding a systems-thinking perspective and consideration of interconnectedness across system domains facilitates resilience stress testing (i.e., the impact of disruptions on the system's ability to recover and adapt). We propose combining risk and resilience stress testing into a tiered approach applicable to complex, interconnected infrastructure.

Cyber security and awareness, investing in a culture of safety

Cyber security is an investment megatrend: global spending on cyber security increases by 10% every year, three times faster than the global economy. These forecasts can be seen on the upside after the arrival of Covid-19 and the IT tracking systems to monitor the infections that pose privacy and security problems for users. Cyber security is growing more and more and so are venture capital investments in what is the megatrend of the year. The pandemic has contributed to speeding up the digitization process: the consequence is an increasingly uniform distribution of cybercrime throughout the European territory and this reminds us that the lack of a security culture is the vulnerability most exploited by attackers. The Covid-19 pandemic is the cause, albeit indirectly, of this phenomenon. Covid-19 has, in fact, accelerated the digital transformation process and the consequence has been an increase in the criminal phenomenon.

How Corona Crisis Affects Critical Flows-a Swedish Perspective

The functioning of modem societies is highly dependent on flows, relying on timely deliveries of goods and services. Criticalflows are those particularly important, e.g., electricity, food, and pharmaceuticals. Infrastructures upholding flows often transgress national borders, where a disruption can escalate into wide-spread crises. Continuity of critical flows is hence of outmost importance under stresses. A worldwide ongoing stress is the coronavirus pandemic, strongly characterizing 2020 and dominating media, resulting in closed borders, lock-downs, halted production, and altered demand patterns. The corona crisis is foremost a health crisis, with devastating consequences on people's life and health. Many studies have focused on the healthcare sector, with limited attention on critical flows in other sectors. This study aims to explore effects on critical flows within four societal sectors (transport, energy, info-com and food) in Sweden to date. A scoping study of Swedish printed press throughout 2020 was performed, investigating actual and potential flow impacts, flow interdependencies, and implications for preparedness and resilience. The media database Retriever Research was used to identify 4693 news and opinion articles, of which 145 relevant articles were subjected to content analysis. Concluding that limited critical flow disruptions occurred despite many prophecies and predictions. The disruptions that occurred were short-lived, non-severe, and mostly originating from secondary effects, indicating that Swedish critical flows in these sectors are resilient to this type of pandemics. © ESREL 2021. Published by Research Publishing, Singapore.

Securing Remote User Authentication in Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) enhances the benefit of the Internet of Things (IoT) to a higher level, especially in industries where human error can lead to catastrophic effects. However, security is a major concern in IIoT as hackers can gain access to connected systems, thus potentially subjecting operations to a shutdown. Besides, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the operations style of organizations into a remote work model. Consequently, there has been a significant increase in cyber-attacks leveraging vulnerabilities of IoT devices connected to the Internet. Considering the above factors, we propose a method of remote user authentication combining Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) with fingerprint bio-metric, which can prevent attacks. PRNU uniquely identifies the scanner, thereby authenticates the device of the user. To prove the effectiveness of PRNU, we collect fingerprint images from various scanners prototyped using Raspberry Pi and evaluate the performance. Our performance evaluation with a set of 10 fingerprint scanners shows promising results. Moreover, our analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves a classification accuracy of 99%. © 2022 IEEE.

COVID-19 and the Case for a National Food Emergency Stockpile

Food insecurity in the United States is not a new challenge, but the coronavirus pandemic has revealed that the current system to sup-port Food Assistance Providers (FAPs) is incredibly brittle and vul-nerable to supply chain disruptions. Many FAPs       use            just-in-time models to support their operations, relying heavily on donations from restaurants and grocers. However, COVID-19 has demon¬strated that when a disaster causes increased food demand and widespread destabilization of food supply chains, jurisdictions are severely constrained from obtaining and delivering food to pop¬ulations in need. Recent events have further amplified a potential danger to current food security strategies in terms of regions expe¬riencing multiple events, such as a pandemic coupled with hurri¬canes, wildfires, or other catastrophes. After exploring the current governmental food security measures, their long-term deficiencies, and other lessons learned through the COVID-19 response, we call for a major policy shift in how the country addresses food insecurity following a disaster. Rather than relying on after-the-fact spending and hastily created infrastruc¬ture, the nation should proactively stockpile shelf-stable food. To this end, we propose establishing a national stockpile of shelf-sta¬ble foods to help protect against future food supply destabilization. © 2020, Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved.

Modeling critical infrastructure resilience under compounding threats: A systematic literature review

Multiple threat events may disrupt critical infrastructure functioning, thereby inhibiting the provision of essential goods and services to affected communities. It is currently unclear how modeling approaches have assessed critical infrastructure resilience when facing compounding (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic co-occurring with natural hazards) or cascading (i.e., landslides following wildland fires) threats. For both, connection across multiple domains of critical infrastructure are of crucial importance and modeling risk and resilience associated with complex threats has been proposed as a way forward in assessing and managing systemic risk and resilience. A systematic review is conducted to understand how critical infrastructure resilience was assessed in network science literature published between 2010 and 2021. The literature was classified based on phases of resilience (preparation, absorption, recovery, and adaptation) and system domains (physical, information, cognitive, social). Results indicate that literature has focused on absorption of compounding and cascading threats by critical infrastructure, particularly within the physical and information domains. Results also identified a potential gap in network science models' incorporation of the resilience phases of preparation and adaption, signifying a potential opportunity for network science methodologies to integrate all four phases into models of critical infrastructure resilience.

Shifting towards Antifragile Critical Infrastructure Systems

Antifragility, which is an evolutionary understanding of resilience, has become a predominant concept in academic and industrial fields as the criticality of vital infrastructures (like healthcare and transportation) has become more flexible and varying due the impact of digitization and adverse circumstances, such as changing the prioritization of industrial services while accelerating IoT (Internet of Things) deployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crucial role of antifragility is to enable critical infrastructures to gain from disorder to foster their adaptability to real unexpected environmental changes. Thus, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the antifragility concept while clarifying the difference with the resilience concept. Moreover, it highlights how the COVID-19 crisis has revealed the fragility of critical infrastructures and unintentionally promoted the antifragility concept. To showcase the main concepts, we adopt the blockchain as an example of an antifragile system.

Post-COVID-19 Revitalisation and Prospects for Climate Neutral Energy Security Technologies

Dealing with the effects of COVID-19 is on the energy security agenda. Consolidation of efforts at the regional, national and international levels to exchange experience in the implementation of successful practices and the formation of institutional support of the sustainable energy development contributes to the post-COVID-19 revitalisation. With this in mind, the article is devoted to studying the peculiarities and experience of the post-COVID-19 revitalisation of the energy sector in different countries and determining the development prospects of climate-neutral technologies in the energy security sphere. A change in the behaviour of energy consumers by the secondary energy source in the context of increased quarantine restrictions has been established. In particular, a downward trend in the volume of energy consumption from traditional sources (oil, coal, etc.) has been traced. At the same time, the demand for energy consumption from renewable sources (solar energy, wind energy, etc.) has grown, which made it possible to diagnose the reduction in CO2 emissions. Based on the analysis of measures to reduce the negative impact of the COVID-19 on energy security in different countries, the integration of the foundations of climate neutrality through the development of new critical technologies in the field of renewable energy sources has been established. As a result of a survey of green energy stakeholders using PEST analysis, it was proved that the complexity of integrating the principles of climate neutrality into the energy sector is that the result is not an economic effect but primarily an environmental effect (energy decarbonization). As a result, a methodology for determining the sustainability indicators for developing climate-neutral technologies in energy security using fuzzy set methods is proposed. The prospect of developing climate-neutral technologies in energy security lies in the transition to cross-sectoral interaction based on a closed cycle of energy consumption from renewable sources and the use of Industry 4.0 technologies. The proposed methodology will be a tool for further research on the developing organizational and innovative support and justifying the economic feasibility of introducing climate-neutral technologies based on the clustering of industries and a circular economy in the energy security sphere. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Problemy Ekorozwoju is the property of Faculty of Environmental Engineering and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The need for a financial sector legal standard to support the NIST Cybersecurity Framework

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the NIST Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity of 2014, followed by an updated version in 2017. The Framework, which was developed as a joint effort between the U.S. Federal Government and the private sector, serves only as a guideline and is not mandated by any legal authority. Currently, adoption of the Framework is voluntary. The Financial Sector, one of sixteen Department of Homeland Security critical infrastructure sectors, should be incentivized to adopt the framework, based on inconsistency and accountability of best practices implementation across the sector. Global cyber attack opportunists used the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic to exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities and gaps in the U.S. Financial Sector. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework provides guidelines for strengthening cybersecurity and identifies areas of potential cyber attack impacts. This paper is a summary of the author's published 2021 doctoral dissertation, which includes research and analysis of reported Financial Sector risks, failures and impacts due to weak or lack of cybersecurity controls. The study also provides analysis of success stories of Financial Sector and other entities which have adopted the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. Dr. Goodwin is a Senior Member of IEEE. © 2022 IEEE.