Short Takes – 10-2-24

Department of Transportation Substantially Increases Grant Funds Supporting State Pipeline and Underground Gas Storage Safety Programs. PHMSA press release. Pull quote: “This year’s award package includes a 33 percent ($21.5 million) increase in comparison to Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 funding levels and will further enable PHMSA’s state partners to hire new pipeline inspectors, provide training, conduct pipeline inspections, and purchase and maintain equipment necessary to carry out their pipeline safety missions.”

Hazardous Materials: Notice of Hazardous Materials Transportation Seminar. Federal Register PHMSA meeting notice. Summary: “The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration's (PHMSA) Office of Hazardous Materials Safety (OHMS) will hold a free Hazardous Materials Transportation Seminar from October 30, 2024, through November 1, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Indianapolis, One South Capital Avenue, Indianapolis, IN 46204. The seminar will be a three-day event with a broad focus on outreach and engagement with PHMSA's stakeholders. Targeted stakeholders include shippers, transporters, and small business particularly in underserved communities, and emergency responders.”

Securing Cities: The Fight Against Local Level Cyberthreats. DomesticPreparedness.com article. Includes a good list of ‘common vulnerabilities’. Pull quote: “In addition to defending against external threats, cybersecurity resilience also addresses the risks posed by human error and insider threats. Employees at all levels can inadvertently expose systems to vulnerabilities through actions such as clicking on phishing emails or misconfiguring security settings. However, the threat does not only come from negligence. Intentional and unintentional insider threats can be just as damaging. Disgruntled employees or others with access to sensitive systems can misuse their privileges, either out of malice or carelessness, leading to significant breaches.”

NOTE: DP also has a couple of interesting ‘flashback’ cyber security articles from Markus Rauschecker (2013) and Joe Weis (2018).

Inside HHS’ ‘one-stop shop’ for health sector cybersecurity. FederalNewsNetwork.com article. Pull quote: “One of the cyber division’s core responsibilities will be incident response, Mazanec said. When a cyber attack hits a major hospital, for instance, ASPR’s team will work with the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to help respond and offer support.”

NIST Cybersecurity White Paper (CSWP) 36B Using Hardware-Enabled Security to Ensure 5G System Platform Integrity - Applying 5G Cybersecurity and Privacy Capabilities White Paper Series Available for Comment. CRSC.NIST.gov announcement. “We are pleased to announce the availability of the third white paper in the series:

“Using Hardware-Enabled Security to Ensure 5G System Platform Integrity—This publication provides an overview of employing hardware-enabled security capabilities to provision, measure, attest to, and enforce the integrity of the compute platform to foster trust in a 5G system’s server infrastructure.” Public comments due October 30^th, 2024.

Deadly Marburg virus: scientists race to test vaccines in outbreak. Nature.com article. Pull quote: “Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville and MARVAC member, says that if the Rwanda outbreak continues, the plan is to trial at least one vaccine in a strategy known as ring vaccination. The approach — which showed the effectiveness of an Ebola vaccine in Guinea during the 2014–16 West African outbreak — involves immunizing contacts of an infected individual.”