Fuzzy Multiple-Criteria Decision Making Based Evaluation of the Incident Analysis Forms Used in Internal Reporting Systems: A Case Study of Tanker Shipping Companies

Under the International Safety Management (ISM) Code, shipping companies are required to build a Safety Management System and develop procedures that will regulate the incident analysis process. By these procedures, the shipping companies develop an incident analysis form and use it on all ships within their fleets. Although these forms serve a common purpose, their structure shows some differences between companies. Thus, time may be wasted when transferring the data or insufficient data may be obtained. This paper examines incident analysis forms used for tanker ships whose hazardous cargos make them of particular importance. The features of incident analysis forms used on tankers of a shipping company were specified, and the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method presented their importance levels. Expert opinion was collected by a questionnaire. The results revealed that the highest priorities belong to the sections allocated for details about the ship and environmental conditions and root cause analysis technique. The least essential sub-criteria were related to the structure and variety of the forms. Based on the study results, which captured the current practice and the sector’s expectations, tanker shipping companies’ existing incident analysis forms could be revised. The revised documents would help to achieve complete information and prevent loss of time in information exchange between companies. Bringing a common approach to the analysis of incidents in tanker shipping would increase safety in the shipping industry.

Chemical Incident Analysis Involving Storage of Fertilizer Product

A forensic engineering analyses of a chemical incident is presented that was classified as a self-sustaining decomposition (SSD) event, which occurred in a load of 10,000 tons of NK 21-00-21 fertilizer bulk stored inside a warehouse in the city of São Francisco do Sul in Brazil. The chemical reaction developed within the fertilizer mass and took several days to be controlled, resulting in the evacuation of thousands of residents. The water used to fight against the reaction, after having contact with the load of fertilizer material, promoted changes in adjacent water bodies, causing the death of animals (fish, crustaceans, and amphibians). The smoke from the chemical reaction products damaged the incident’s surrounding vegetation. Large SSD events are rare, with an average worldwide frequency of one every three years. Therefore, in addition to presenting a case study of this type of phenomenon, the main objective of this work is to discuss the causes that led to SSD reaction at this event, evaluate its consequences, and motivate future studies.

Threat Action Extraction using Information Retrieval

To gain insight into potential cyber threats, this research proposes a novel automatic threat action retrieval system, which collects and analyzes various data sources including security news, incident analysis reports, and darknet hacker forums and develops an improved data preprocessing method to reduce feature dimension and a novel query match algorithm to capture effective threat actions automatically without manually predefined ontology applied by the past research. The experimental results illustrate that The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 94.7% and a recall rate of 95.8% and outperforms the previous research. The proposed solution can extract effective threat actions automatically and efficiently.

Review of Human Decision-making during Computer Security Incident Analysis

We review practical advice on decision-making during computer security incident response. Scope includes standards from the IETF, ISO, FIRST, and the US intelligence community. To focus on human decision-making, the scope is the evidence collection, analysis, and reporting phases of response, which includes human decision-making within and connecting these phases. The results indicate both strengths and gaps. A strength is available advice on how to accomplish many specific tasks. However, there is little guidance on how to prioritize tasks in limited time or how to interpret, generalize, and convincingly report results. Future work should focus on these gaps in explication and specification of decision-making during incident analysis.