Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities in Mobile Fare Payment Applications: A Case Study

Author(s):  
Kevin Dennis ◽  
Maxat Alibayev ◽  
Sean J. Barbeau ◽  
Jay Ligatti

Mobile fare payment applications are becoming increasingly common in the public transportation industry as a convenience for customers and as part of an effort to reduce fare management costs and improve operations for agencies. However, there is relatively little literature on vulnerabilities and liabilities in mobile fare payment applications. Furthermore, few public agencies or supporting vendors have policies or established processes in place to receive vulnerability reports or patch vulnerabilities discovered in their technologies. Given the rapidly increasing number of data breaches in general industry IT systems, as well as that mobile fare payment apps are a nexus between customer and agency financial information, the security of these mobile applications deserves further scrutiny. This paper presents a vulnerability discovered in a mobile fare payment application deployed at a transit agency in Florida that, because of the system architecture, may have affected customers in as many as 40 cities across the United States, an estimated 1,554,000 users. Lessons learned from the vulnerability disclosure process followed by the research team as well as recommendations for public agencies seeking to improve the security of these types of applications are also discussed.

Author(s):  
Edward Bart ◽  
Amber Reep

Professional and workforce development is important to maintaining the safe and reliable operational integrity of the public transportation industry in the United States. This paper discusses a new concept of professional and workforce development called longitudinal training and its benefits, influences, challenges, examples, and culture. Additionally, these factors are directly associated with new advances in technology, educational techniques, paradigms, and strategies for workforce and professional development.


Author(s):  
Jodi Godfrey ◽  
Gennaro Saliceto ◽  
Roberta Yegidis

Destructive natural disasters such as hurricanes or other extreme weather events challenge many industries, especially the public transit industry. The 2017 hurricane season proved to be tumultuous, with three major hurricanes devastating the United States in less than 2 months. The challenges faced in Florida, in response to Hurricane Irma, precipitated best practices and lessons learned related to monitoring and reporting the status of transportation infrastructure, identifying temporary alternative solutions, and coordinating and communicating with emergency operations centers, state departments of transportation, and individual transit agencies. Sharing the lessons learned from recent firsthand experiences will undoubtedly improve the public transit industry’s emergency preparedness, response, and recovery activities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312110283
Author(s):  
Judith Simon ◽  
Gernot Rieder

Ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, questions of whom or what to trust have become paramount. This article examines the public debates surrounding the initial development of the German Corona-Warn-App in 2020 as a case study to analyse such questions at the intersection of trust and trustworthiness in technology development, design and oversight. Providing some insights into the nature and dynamics of trust and trustworthiness, we argue that (a) trust is only desirable and justified if placed well, that is, if directed at those being trustworthy; that (b) trust and trustworthiness come in degrees and have both epistemic and moral components; and that (c) such a normatively demanding understanding of trust excludes technologies as proper objects of trust and requires that trust is directed at socio-technical assemblages consisting of both humans and artefacts. We conclude with some lessons learned from our case study, highlighting the epistemic and moral demands for trustworthy technology development as well as for public debates about such technologies, which ultimately requires attributing epistemic and moral duties to all actors involved.


1989 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perry Moore

This research provides information about the health care cost containment efforts of local governments and agencies across the United States, particularly in large American cities. Survey results indicate that while the public sector lags behind the private sector, public agencies are beginning to match the cost containment efforts of private employers. While initiation of these efforts represents considerable recent progress, their tangible benefits are not yet apparent.


Author(s):  
Alexander Kolpakov ◽  
Austin Marie Sipiora ◽  
Caley Johnson ◽  
Erin Nobler

This case study presents findings from an analysis of the emergency preparation and response for Hurricane Irma, the most recent hurricane impacting the Tampa Bay region. The Tampa Bay region, in particular, is considered one of the most vulnerable areas in the United States to hurricanes and severe tropical weather. A particular vulnerability stems from how all petroleum fuel comes to the area by marine transport through Port Tampa Bay, which can be (and has been in the past) impacted by hurricanes and tropical storms. The case study discussed in this paper covers previous fuel challenges, vulnerabilities, and lessons learned by key Tampa Bay public agency fleets during the past 10 years (mainly as a result of the most recent 2017 Hurricane Irma) to explore ways to improve the area’s resilience to natural disasters. Some of the strategies for fuel-supply resiliency include maintaining emergency fuel supply, prioritizing fuel use, strategically placing the assets around the region to help with recovery, investing in backup generators (including generators powered by alternative fuels), planning for redundancies in fuel supply networks, developing more efficient communication procedures between public fleets, hurricane preparedness-planning, and upgrading street drainage systems to reduce the threat of local flooding.


YMER Digital ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (12) ◽  
pp. 446-455
Author(s):  
Eshetu Mathewos Juta ◽  

The term “urban mass transit” generally refers to scheduled intra-city service on a fixed route in shared vehicles. Public transportation is an important contributing factor to urban sustainability. Effective transportation networks that incorporate public transit livable by easing commute and transportation needs and increasing accessibility. To assess public transportation accessibility in metropolitan networks, two indices are used: the supply level of urban public transportation facilities resource and the public transportation-private automobile traveling time ratio. As the research in the Wolaita sodo town region and the assessment system, an evaluation technique for urban public transportation facility resource supply is developed based on accessibility. Accessibility is a representative indicator for evaluating the supply of bus system. Traditional studies have evaluated the accessibility from different aspects. Considering the interaction among land use, bus timetable arrangement and individual factors, a more holistic accessibility measurement is proposed to combine static and dynamic characteristics from multisource traffic data. The objective is to highlight the main lessons learned and identify knowledge gaps to guide the design and evaluation of future transport investments. Moreover, studies looking at ways to improve the operational efficiency of systems and those seeking to promote behavioral changes in transport users offer great potential to generate learning that is useful for the public and private actors involved.


Author(s):  
Bamidele Ola ◽  
Iyobor Egho-Promise

The emergence of ecommerce almost three decades ago has completely transformed the approach to purchasing goods and services across various countries in the world. Almost every country in the globe, now have some form of ecommerce operations, this has further been enhanced by the stay at home COVID-19 induced lockdowns. The value and volume of transactions has also increased in transactions. However, there has been security concerns impacting ecommerce operations, which has in part, led to increasing adoption of hosting ecommerce systems in the public cloud. Threat modelling offer mechanisms to enhance the security of information technology (IT) systems. In this paper, we apply different threat modelling techniques to decompose the migration of an on-premise hosted ecommerce system to the public cloud and also evaluate these threat modelling techniques.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Fox ◽  
Joshua Frye

According to the School Nutrition Association, nearly 100,000 schools serve free or reduced school lunches and breakfasts daily to approximately 34. 34 million students nationwide. However, as COVID-19 forced many schools to close, students who depended on the public schools to meet the majority of their nutritional needs faced an even larger battle with food insecurity. Recognizing this unmet need, and that food insecurity was intertwined with other needs within the community, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and its satellite contemporary art space the Momentary, partnered with the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank and over 30 additional partner organizations to pivot their existing outreach services. In this case study, we identify lessons learned by Crystal Bridges that might be useful for other organizations who seek to foster meaningful engagement with the public, especially in times of crisis. Specifically, we focus on three main lessons: 1) how the museum created a plan to learn through the pivot in order to capture their own lessons, 2) how the members of the organization experienced a sense of coming together (congregation) during the pivot, and 3) how the organization planned to improve both internal and external communication.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Swerts

In recent years, undocumented youth have come out of the shadows to claim their rights in the United States. By sharing their stories, these youth gained a voice in the public debate. This article integrates insights from the literature on narratives and emotions to study how story-telling is employed within the undocumented youth movement in Chicago. I argue that undocumented youth strategically use storytelling for diverging purposes depending on the context, type of interaction, and audience involved. Based on ethnographic research, I show that storytelling allows them to incorporate new members, mobilize constituencies, and legitimize grievances. In each of these contexts, emotions play a key role in structuring the social transaction between storyteller and audience. Storytelling is thus a community-building, mobilizing, and claims-making practice in social movements. At a broader level, this case study demonstrates the power of storytelling as a political tool for marginalized populations.


Author(s):  
Rachel Baarda ◽  
Rocci Luppicini

Ethical challenges that technology poses to the different spheres of society are a core focus within the field of technoethics. Over the last few years, scholars have begun to explore the ethical implications of new digital technologies and social media, particularly in the realms of society and politics. A qualitative case study was conducted on Barack Obama's campaign social networking site, my.barackobama.com, in order to investigate the ways in which the website uses or misuses digital technology to create a healthy participatory democracy. For an analysis of ethical and non-ethical ways to promote participatory democracy online, the study included theoretical perspectives such as the role of the public sphere in a participatory democracy and the effects of political marketing on the public sphere. The case study included a content analysis of the website and interviews with members of groups on the site. The study's results are explored in this chapter.


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