Category Archives: Emerging Risk

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Dallas Alarms Hack a Warning of Infrastructure Vulnerability

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Dallas residents were wide awake and in a state of confusion late Friday night when the city’s outdoor emergency system was hacked, causing all of its 156 alarms to blast for an hour-and-a-half until almost 1:30 a.

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With some interpreting the warning as a bomb or missile, a number of residents dialed 9-1-1, but the number of calls—4,400 in all—overwhelmed the system, causing some callers to wait for up to six minutes for a response, the New York Times reported.

The alarms blasted for 90-second durations about 15 times, Rocky Vaz, the director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, told reporters at a news conference.

Mr. Vaz said emergency workers and technicians had to first figure out whether the sirens had been activated because of an actual emergency. And turning off the sirens also proved difficult, eventually prompting officials to shut down the entire system.

“Every time we thought we had turned it off, the sirens would sound again, because whoever was hacking us was continuously hacking us,” Sana Syed, a spokeswoman for the city told the Times.

Eventually the alarms were turned off, which had to be done manually, one alarm at a time.

On Saturday afternoon the system, used for hurricanes and other warnings, was still down, but officials said they hoped to have it functioning soon.

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 They also said they had pinpointed the origin of the security breach after ruling out that the alarms had come from their control system or from remote access.

Mr. Vaz said that Dallas had reached out to the Federal Communications Commission for help and was taking steps to prevent hackers from setting off the system again, but that city officials had not communicated with federal law enforcement authorities.

Security officials have warned about the risks that such hacking attacks pose to infrastructure, which is often aging and in disrepair. Federal data shows that the number of attacks on critical infrastructure appears to have risen: to nearly 300 in 2015 from just under 200 in 2012. Attacks include a 2008 oil pipeline explosion in Turkey; a 2015 hacking of Ukraine’s power grid, leaving 200,000 people in Western Ukraine without electricity for several hours; and in 2013, hackers tried to gain control of a small dam in upstate New York. Seven computer specialists, who worked for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

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, were indicted for trying to take over controls of the dam, according to the Times.

Increasing Risk Complexity Outpaces ERM Oversight

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More organizations are recognizing the value of a structured focus on emerging risks. The number of organizations with a complete enterprise risk management (ERM) program in place has steadily risen from 9% in 2009 to 28% in 2016, according to the N.C. State Poole College of Management’s survey “The State of Risk Oversight: An Overview of Enterprise Risk Management Practices.”

Yet this progress may lag behind the increasingly complicated risks that need addressing. Of respondents, 20% noted an “extensive” increase in the volume and complexity of risks the past five years, with an additional 38% saying the volume and complexity of risks have increased “mostly.” This is similar to participant responses in the most recent prior years. In fact, only 2% said the volume and complexity of risks have not changed at all.
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Even with improvements in the number of programs implemented, the study—which is based on responses of 432 executives from a variety of industries—found there is room for improvement. Overall, 26% of respondents have no formal enterprise-wide approach to risk oversight and currently have no plans to consider this form of risk oversight.

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Organizations that do have programs continue to struggle to integrate their risk oversight efforts with strategic planning processes.

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“Significant opportunities remain for organizations to continue to strengthen their approaches to identifying and assessing key risks facing the entity especially as it relates to coordinating these efforts with strategic planning activities,” the researchers found.

According to the study:

Many argue that the volume and complexity of risks faced by organizations today continue to evolve at a rapid pace, creating huge challenges for management and boards in their oversight of the most important risks. Recent events such as Brexit, the U.

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S. presidential election, immigration challenges, the constant threat of terrorism, and cyber threats, among numerous other issues, represent examples of challenges management and boards face in navigating an organization’s risk landscape.

Key findings include:

Software May Help Oil Companies Determine a Location’s Earthquake Potential

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New software for monitoring the probability of earthquakes in a targeted location could help energy companies determine where they can operate safely.

The free tool, developed by Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, helps operators estimate how much pressure nearby faults can handle before rupturing, by combining three important pieces of information:

  • Location and geometry of the fault
  • Natural stresses in the ground
  • Pressure changes likely to be brought on by injections

“Faults are everywhere in the Earth’s crust, so you can’t avoid them. Fortunately, the majority of them are not active and pose no hazard to the public. The trick is to identify which faults are likely to be problematic, and that’s what our tool does,” said Mark Zoback, professor of geophysics at Stanford, who developed the approach with graduate student Rail Walsh.

Fossil fuel exploration companies have been linked to the increased number of earthquakes in some areas—Oklahoma in particular—that have been determined to be the result of fracking. According to the Dallas Morning News:

Only around 10% of wastewater wells in the central and eastern United States have been linked with earthquakes. But that small share, scientists believe, helped kick-start the most dramatic earthquake surge in modern history.

From 2000 — before the start of America’s recent energy boom — to 2015, Oklahoma saw its earthquake rate jump from two per year to 4,000 per year. In 2016, its overall number fell to 2,500, but its quakes grew stronger.

Five other states, including Texas, Arkansas and Kansas, have seen unprecedented increases in ground shaking tied to the wells, although North Texas had no earthquakes strong enough to be felt last year.

The insurance industry has also been monitoring the rise in temblors. A Swiss Re report concluded, “It’s highly likely that this dramatic rise in earthquake occurrence is largely a consequence of human actions.”

According to the report:

Along with the increase in seismicity, Oklahoma has seen a growth in its oil and natural gas operations since 2008, specifically hydraulic fracturing (often referred to as “hydrofracking” or “fracking”) and the disposal of wastewater via deep well injection. Both hydrofracking and deep well injection involve pumping high-pressure fluids into the ground. A consensus of scientific opinion now links these practices to observed increases in seismic activity. Earthquakes where the cause can be linked to human actions are termed ‘induced earthquakes,’ and present an emerging risk of which the insurance industry is taking note.

International Women’s Day: Risk Management Issues to Watch

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A 2013 piece on the role of women in risk management remains the most controversial article we’ve ever run in Risk Management magazine and the one that received the most comments and letters to the editor, hands down. Many of those reader comments were…let’s just say less than kind or receptive.

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Today, International Women’s Day, offers the perfect opportunity to revisit that article, Woman at Work: Why Women Should Lead Risk Management, and some of our more recent coverage of pressing issues like the wage gap and gender parity at the board level.

The significance of this conversation is ever clearer, given not only the political climate and regulatory concerns, but also the simple data about the bottom line. Just last year, the Peterson Institute for International Economics and EY found that almost a third of companies globally have no women in either board or C-suite positions, 60% have no female board members, 50% have no female top executives, and less than 5% have a female CEO. After analyzing 21,980 publicly traded companies from 91 countries and a wide range of industries, their report, Is Gender Diversity Profitable? Evidence from a Global Study, found that organizations with leadership that is at least 30% female could add up to 6 percentage points to its net margin.

“The impact of having more women in senior leadership on net margin, when a third of companies studied do not, begs the question of what would be the global economic impact if more women rose in the ranks?” said Stephen R. Howe Jr., EY’s U.S. chairman and Americas managing partner. “The research demonstrates that while increasing the number of women directors and CEOs is important, growing the percentage of female leaders in the C-suite would likely benefit the bottom line even more.

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While study after study comes to similar conclusions, a recent report from EY explored why businesses need gender diversity for the innovation to thrive. Five disconnects continue to hold businesses back from achieving gender diversity on their boards, the firm found:

  1. The reality disconnect: Business leaders assume the issue is nearly solved despite little progress within their own companies.
  2. The data disconnect: Companies don’t effectively measure how well women are progressing through the workforce and into senior leadership.
  3. The pipeline disconnect: Organizations aren’t creating pipelines for future female leaders.
  4. The perception and perspective disconnect: Men and women don’t see issues the same way.
  5. The progress disconnect: Different sectors agree on the value of diversity but are making uneven progress toward gender parity.

Check out some of our previous coverage of key issues regarding women in business and risk management specifically:
Equal Work, Unequal Pay: Risks of the Gender Wage Gap
The Wage Gap in the Boardroom
Is the Insurance Industry Improving for Women?
Boards Still Lagging on Gender Parity
Preparing for New Pay Equity Requirements