MCP Insights

Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Major ‘Vishing’ Campaign

As part of our effort to inform our clients about potential and serious cybersecurity issues, MCP provides advisories about vulnerabilities and exploits that could threaten the operations of their mission-critical communications networks. Sign up to receive these advisories in your inbox as soon as they are released.

NG911 Strategic Plans Only Are Effective If They Can Be Operationalized Effectively

Many organizations have short- and long-term strategic plans.

Successful organizations have strategic plans that can be operationalized effectively. In June, during our inaugural Conference for Advancing Public Safety (CAPS), Curtis Sutton, executive director of the Tennessee Emergency Communications Board, and Karen Ziegler, public safety program manager, Arizona 911 Program, joined MCP subject-matter experts Jackie Mines and Molly Falls, in a panel discussion that was focused in part on best practices for operationalizing Next Generation 911 (NG911) strategic plans. You can watch the session in its entirety here.

An Effective Network Operations Center Does More Than Provide Alerts

A while back, one of Mission Critical Partners' (MCP's) long-standing clients, the Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council (LRGVDC) in Texas, was growing increasingly frustrated with its third-party network operations center (NOC). It always is good for an emergency-response organization to enlist the services of a NOC to ensure the reliability of its mission-critical communications networks and systems and to perform network troubleshooting. But in this case, the NOC’s performance was insufficient, according to Hector Chapa, program supervisor II, who oversees the council’s communications systems and emergency communications center (ECC) ECC operations.

PUCs Can—and Should—Continue to Play an Important Role in NG911 Oversight

In the United States, a public utility commission (PUC) is an entity that, under any state law, has regulatory jurisdiction with respect to intrastate operations of utilities. (In some states, such entities are known as public service commissions or corporate commissions.) PUCs set rates and tariffs, ensure the effectiveness of services provided by companies in the water/wastewater, electrical, natural gas, transportation and telecommunications sectors, and address consumer protection and complaints.

In the past, PUCs have performed an oversight role regarding legacy 911/Enhanced 911 (E911) services, which traditionally have been delivered by telecommunications carriers to emergency communications centers (ECCs)—also known as public safety answering points (PSAPs)—over wireline copper frameworks, but this may not be the case in the future regarding Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled Next Generation 911 (NG911) services, which are delivered over wireless, broadband or fiber-optic infrastructures.

Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Two Microsoft Zero-Day Attack Vulnerabilities

As part of our effort to inform our clients about potential and serious cybersecurity issues, MCP provides advisories about vulnerabilities and exploits that could threaten the operations of their mission-critical communications networks. Sign up to receive these advisories in your inbox as soon as they are released.

This week, there is a new critical alert that requires the mission-critical community’s immediate attention.

Advisory Summary

Microsoft has addressed two zero-day vulnerabilities in last week’s rollout of security patches. A zero-day vulnerability is a software security flaw that is known to the software vendor but no patch exists to fix the flaw, creating the potential for exploitation by cybercriminals.

How Mission-Critical Organizations Can Leverage Penetration Testing to Protect Against Cyberattacks

Amid efforts to expose cybersecurity vulnerabilities in a network before an attacker does, penetration testing, also referred to as a pen test or a white-hat attack, continues to gain momentum as a viable means to detect weaknesses in an organization’s network infrastructure.

If the term penetration testing is foreign to you, it is not as intrusive as it sounds. The objective of a penetration test is to provide information technology (IT) and system managers with critically needed intelligence regarding their organization’s security vulnerabilities. Whether the testing is performed manually or via sophisticated automation tools, it is best conducted by a third party that can use the same tools many hackers rely on. Many of these tools are widely available, arming testers with a better understanding of how they can be used to attack an organization.

With GIS Centerlines, the Devil Often is in the Details

Public safety agencies draw polygons using their geographic information systems (GIS) that define their jurisdictional footprints and the areas in which they provision emergency services. When such polygons abut, generally along jurisdictional borders, they must “snap” to each other; another way of expressing that is to say that the polygon borders must be coincident. If they are not, overlaps and/or gaps can occur—both are problematic from an emergency response perspective. Jurisdictional boundaries most often are in the form of road centerlines, which represent the center of a real-world road.

Developing Your Mission-Critical Agency’s Continuity-of-Operations Plan

Continuity-of-operations plans (COOP) represent a significant investment of time and resources. However, COOPs are also critical to maintaining a mission-critical agency’s operations during and after a natural or manmade event— including, but not limited to, tornadoes, hurricanes, pandemics, and terrorist attacks. While it is impossible to prevent or predict these events, having a COOP in place can help mitigate the effects of such disasters—ultimately enabling an agency to maintain critical operations when communities need them most.

An Effective Way to Improve Evidence Management

An axiom within the criminal-justice community is that the more evidence that can be captured and leveraged by the prosecution, the better. Corollary to that axiom, however, is that evidence—regardless of type or quantity—has no utility if it is not easily accessed and shared, or worse, somehow falls through the cracks. The way to prevent such problems from occurring is to deploy a digital evidence management solution, or DEMS.

Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Windows DNS Servers

As part of our effort to inform our clients about potential and serious cybersecurity issues, MCP provides advisories about vulnerabilities and exploits that could threaten the operations of their mission-critical communications networks. Sign up to receive these advisories in your inbox as soon as they are released.

This week, there is a new critical alert that requires the mission-critical community’s immediate attention.

Why Critical Infrastructure Agencies Should Monitor for Exposed Credentials

The average number of breached data records, including credentials, per U.S.-based company, is an astounding number—28,500.

Honoring Two Public Safety Visionaries

In Memoriam: Chief Robert Full, Pittsburgh, PA, and Robert Bloom, Alexandria, VA

The Mission Critical Partners (MCP) team was saddened to learn of the passing of two incredible public safety leaders, and friends of MCP, this past week – Former Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) EMS chief and fire marshal Robert Full and Robert Bloom, Public Safety Systems Administrator, Alexandria, Virginia, Department of Emergency and Customer Communications (DECC).