Attached is the group research that our group worked on and the professor requires each of our individual members to Submit a 1500 word APA formatted paper on your group research experience; what did

Running Head; THREATS ON CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND COUNTERMEASURES 0

Below is the group research that our group worked on and professor requires each of our individual members to Submit a 1500 word APA formatted paper on your group research experience; what did go well? what were your challenges? How you divided the work? What you learnt from this project ? who will you apply this project in your real time work experience? Etc

All the 1500 words should be unique and not plagiarized. Please review the below project we worked on and start this assignment.

FYI: The below project is worked by 10 members in the group and each of us divided the work. This work was done in 2 day Friday and Saturday.

I need a turntin report.

Threats on Critical Infrastructure and Countermeasures

Critical infrastructure is assets, systems and networks both physical and virtual upon which the public safety depends on in an economy (Coppolino et al., 2017). These are the key industries which support an economy. In the United States of America, so vital are these industries that their supervision all other depart of homeland directives. These key hubs of economic survival of the people are under constant threats. Although there have been works of research on critical infrastructure and the challenges affecting the sectors, there exists huge research gaps which if filled could inform government policy and save the livelihood of people and society groups. This section looks into the previous studies, published works and journal articles relevant to literature that already exists in the challenges affecting the critical infrastructure. This literature will inform a more up-to-date research, by identifying existing research gaps in this key area of research.

Equipment Failure

In 2016, three scholars Setola, Luiijf, and Theocharidou sought to identify the lapses that exist in the government’s course to secure critical infrastructure. They had a key focus the state of the initial infrastructural investment and the routine government maintenance on the transportation system, the water and wastewater system and the dam sectors (Setola et al., 2016). Secondly, they sought to identify the wearing out rates on the equipments and the established physical investments in the country. The three employed the review of government fiscal planning documents on the three sectors, reports issued by the homeland security department and primary investment documents for the sectors (Setola et al., 2016).

Setola and the two others identified huge extents of neglect on the tear and wear problems in the sector infrastructure. They also established that there were low reinvestment rates on the sectors despite generating big revenues for the government. The study concluded that the government was mean in maintaining these industries despite its public commitment in enhancing them. The scholars therefore recommended that strides are made towards revitalizing the investments by having an effective surveillance whose observations are quickly attended to (Setola et al., 2016).

In another study, on the aspect of equipment failure, Linkov and Palma embarked on investigating the cause of water connectivity disruptions and the unreliability of the rail transport in the major suburb settlements in the country. They employed the use of expert interviews, questionnaires on those affected by the disruptions as well as the review of maintenance records from the state department of water and that of transport (Linkov & Palma-Oliveira, 2017). It was identified that the main cause of the disruptions was rarely systemic but mainly the leakage of water pipes and the destruction of railway lines due to tear and wear effects. The duo also established, from the documents that some of the water and rail lines had not been changed since installation. This, according to them, aggravated the problem, coupled with the ever increasing urban settlement brought about by modernity. The study recommended that a continuous monitoring and repair policy is adopted and implemented on the infrastructure (Linkov & Palma-Oliveira, 2017).

The above two studies, however, overlooked the impact of the contemporary trends in modern life. For instance, they missed the problem of poor staffing, poor motivation and other aspects of human resource that have continuously pulled back the progress on efficient service to the public. Their findings therefore fail to acknowledge what an earlier study by Hurst, Merabt and Fergus which pointed human resource inefficiency as the main source deteriorating productivity of the three components of critical infrastructure in the United States of America (Hurst et al., 2014).

Human Error

Two works of research have largely attributed the public pessimism in the critical infrastructure to poor services to the public associated with these industries. Walker-Roberts, Hammoudeh and Dehghantanha embarked on identifying the source of the low productivity in healthcare and public health, government facilities, energy and the financial sectors. In their research, the three sought to investigate the specific issues in human error that derailed the success of the four industries and understand the extent to which the staff employed impeded the progress of the mentioned industries. They had a hypothesis, based on earlier studies that 27% of the inefficiencies of an institution are directly from staff inefficiencies (Whiteet al., 2016). The study adopted the use of organizational data in the four industries and review of reports on recorded failure incidences (Walker-Roberts et al., 2018).

True to their anticipation, the three identified that human failures had a 34% contribution in the failure to reach the projected revenue generation targets. These errors entailed poor procedure, especially in the healthcare and financial sectors which led to losses and successful litigations by the public and lobby groups, carelessness especially in the energy sector which caused deadly industrial accidents in the past and recent power outages that resulted in huge financial losses (Walker-Roberts et al., 2018). Other errors included general laxity and poor customer service which contributed to negative perception from the public and consequent cuts in the financial budgets. The study concluded that the human resource aspect in the industries should be urgently reviewed to put forward competent personnel in the industries. Such were the recommendations of the study.

In 2017, Trump, Poinsatte-Jones, Elran, Allen, Srdjevic, Merad and Palma-Oliveira investigated the impact of human resource inefficiencies in the government run critical infrastructure in the United States of America. Here, they sought to establish the extent to which human resource inadequacies affect the delivery of the critical infrastructure. Secondly, they wanted to identify the most affected industries. The study was done through the review of documents on the performance of government rum firms against those run by the private sector (Trump et al., 2017). Key data as also gathered through the public online surveys to collect the opinion of the public on what impedes the progress of government managed critical infrastructure.

It was established that the public had a disliking towards government services (Trump et al., 2017). Particularly, the public online survey indicated that the citizenry was particularly unsatisfied with the government provided healthcare, water and electricity. Those who participated indicated that the problem largely due interruptions and delay of services, attributes they said the private sector was effective in. Additionally, review of financial documents indicated that since the liberalization of most of the traditionally government run industries, and those affiliated to the critical infrastructure; there has been a shift where the public shifted its preferences to the private sector.

The two papers of research paid little concern in investigating the effects of modern economics practice where the government has little control on the critical infrastructure. Secondly, the paper was limited with regards to its scope. It only addressed itself to a small fraction of the causes of failure in the critical instructions, ignoring other major factors such as the information technological threat that has come with the advancement of technology.

Organized Attacks

Physical attacks entails the destruction of power lines, mining infrastructure and other physical assets invested on particular industries. Physical attacks range from simple burglary to large scale destructions such as fire outbreaks in the mines and terror attacks witnessed recently across the world. According to a study conducted last year, organized attacked can largely be attributed to poor organizational policies and lack of knowledge by the public on how to detect and destroy threats before they cause harms (Badea et al., 2018).

In 2018 Hegemann and Kahl, embarked on a study on security governance and the depoliticisation of development in the United States of America. The study sought to identify the connection between development and politics. Secondly, the study aimed at establishing ways in which the government can step in to wade of derailment of its projects through controlled politics. The two scholars used the review of previous works of research and information from security and development experts. The research identified that negative politics incited the public against development. According scholars, this leads to boycott of products, employment in government institutions, spread of negative propaganda against government-initiated development as well as physical attacks on development projects (Hegemann & Kahl, 2018). From their study, the duo attributed terrorist attacks to politics of development.

The study further identified the use of diplomacy to solve political problems as one of the ways in which the government can use politic to spearhead development. Additionally, it was established that through strategic development the government can wipe out bitterness of the public towards its development initiatives. These strategic developments includes providing employment opportunities, education of the people and doing enough development communications before laying down a development projects in the critical infrastructure (Hegemann & Kahl, 2018).

In a different study, Carlin, Hammoudeh, and Aldabbas conducted a research on the threats of cloud and virtual systems. The trio indicated that the current way of doing business is dominated by aspects of technology such as business intelligence. These services, the researchers indicate, are accessed from the cloud, a common pull of information technology application functions. They are accessed from faraway lands bringing in the challenge of data security and data sovereignty. The researchers therefore sought to establish the main cause of cloud system threats and the countermeasures. The paper used informative interviews from experts in information technology academics and practice and reviewed reports from reported data insecurity incidences (Carlin et al., 2015).

Carlin and others established that cloud hosting of applications used by the critical infrastructures in the country were subject to tampering by laws of countries where the data as hosted. Secondly, the study identified that there are instances insider trading even with the cloud system; data is still vulnerable to unauthorized access from potential threats (Carlin et al., 2015). Additionally, the researchers established that there are newly emerging systemic viruses and warms with malicious motives. These insecurities have mainly affected government services, the financial sector and the telecommunication industry. The researchers recommended the retrogression to the in-house technological application arrangements coupled with stringent policies for information technology (Carlin et al., 2015).

The above works of research, avoided the aspect of economic liberalization, characteristic of the modern economics. There is little or no research directed at the significance of the highly privatized critical infrastructure on the performance of these industries. For instance, there have been insights from commentators on economy indicating that the departure of majority of the citizens from government amenities to private services have led to the loss of government control on the critical infrastructure and the huge budget cuts on some of the industries. However, this is yet to be established by a work of research

References

Badea, D., Coman, M. M., Iancu, D., & Bucoveţchi, O. (2018). Critical Infrastructure Protection in the Knowledge Society: Increasing the Safety Level by Use of Learning based on Wargaming Expertise. BRAIN. Broad Research in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, 9(4), 38-48.

Carlin, A., Hammoudeh, M., & Aldabbas, O. (2015). Intrusion detection and countermeasure of virtual cloud systems-state of the art and current challenges. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 6(6).

Coppolino, L., D’Antonio, S., Mazzeo, G., & Romano, L. (2017). Cloud security: Emerging threats and current solutions. Computers & Electrical Engineering, 59, 126-140.

Hegemann, H., & Kahl, M. (2018). Security governance and the limits of depoliticisation: EU policies to protect critical infrastructures and prevent radicalisation. Journal of international relations and development, 21(3), 552-579.

Hurst, W., Merabti, M., & Fergus, P. (2014, March). A survey of critical infrastructure security. In International Conference on Critical Infrastructure Protection (pp. 127-138). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Linkov, I., & Palma-Oliveira, J. M. (2017). An introduction to resilience for critical infrastructures. In Resilience and Risk (pp. 3-17). Springer, Dordrecht.

Trump, B. D., Poinsatte-Jones, K., Elran, M., Allen, C., Srdjevic, B., Merad, M., ... & Palma-Oliveira, J. M. (2017). Social resilience and critical infrastructure systems. In Resilience and risk (pp. 289-299). Springer, Dordrecht.

Setola, R., Luiijf, E., & Theocharidou, M. (2016). Critical infrastructures, protection and resilience. In Managing the Complexity of Critical Infrastructures (pp. 1-18). Springer, Cham.

Walker-Roberts, S., Hammoudeh, M., & Dehghantanha, A. (2018). A systematic review of the availability and efficacy of countermeasures to internal threats in healthcare critical infrastructure. IEEE Access, 6, 25167-25177.

White, R., George, R., Boult, T., & Chow, C. E. (2016). Apples to Apples: RAMCAP and Emerging Threats to Lifeline Infrastructure. Homeland Security Affairs, 12.