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This study aims to contribute to strategic crisis communication research by exploring international media representations of third sector crises and crisis response; expanding the range of crisis types beyond transgressions; and developing a framework that integrates framing and crisis communication theory.

Quantitative content analysis was applied to identify patterns in crisis reporting of 18 news media outlets in Canada, Germany, India, Switzerland, UK and US. Using an inductive framing approach, crisis coverage of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) between 2015 and 2018 was analyzed across a wide range of crises, including but not limited to prominent cases such as Oxfam, Kids Company, or the Islamic Research Foundation.

The news media in six countries report more internal crises in the third sector than external crises. The most frequent crisis types were fraud and corruption, sexual violence/personal exploitation and attacks on organizations. Exploratory factor analysis revealed three components of crisis response strategies quoted in the media, conditional rebuild, defensive and justified denial strategies. Causal attributions and conditional rebuild strategies significantly influenced media evaluations of organizational crisis response. Three frames of third sector crises were detected; the critique, the damage and the victim frame. These frames emphasize different crisis types, causes, crisis response strategies and evaluations of crisis response.

The study reveals the particularities of crises and crisis communication in the third sector and identifies factors that influence mediated portrayals of crises and crisis response strategies of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) from an international comparative perspective. The findings have relevant implications for crisis communication theory and practice.

This chapter examines the concepts of race and racism, critically reviewing their historical and contemporary applications in everyday life as well as in academic and policy debates. Racism has been extensively researched, with various theories and conceptualisations developed across social science. However, there is a great deal of disagreement regarding its nature, contemporary significance and empirical validation. This chapter examines these and attempts to synthesise some of the common definitions of racism provided in the literature. It explores related concepts and underlying themes pertaining to expressions of race and racism. Furthermore, it unpacks current knowledge about racial issues and discusses recent advances in the conceptual understanding of various forms of racism. It also elucidates the social, political and analytical applications of racism as a concept and the significance of racism in contemporary societies. The chapter concludes by highlighting how racism is a dynamic phenomenon, continuously evolving with the social, political and technological transformations in contemporary societies.

Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks develop unauthorized entry to various network services and user information by building traffic that creates multiple requests simultaneously making the system unavailable to users. Protection of internet services requires effective DoS attack detection to keep an eye on traffic passing across protected networks, freeing the protected internet servers from surveillance threats and ensuring they can focus on offering high-quality services with the fewest response times possible.

This paper aims to develop a hybrid optimization-based deep learning model to precisely detect DoS attacks.

The designed Aquila deer hunting optimization-enabled deep belief network technique achieved improved performance with an accuracy of 92.8%, a true positive rate of 92.8% and a true negative rate of 93.6.

The introduced detection approach effectively detects DoS attacks available on the internet.

The purpose of this study is to extensively explore the vehicular network paradigm, challenges faced by them and provide a reasonable solution for securing these vulnerable networks. Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication has brought the long-anticipated goal of safe, convenient and sustainable transportation closer to reality. The connected vehicle (CV) paradigm is critical to the intelligent transportation systems vision. It imagines a society free of a troublesome transportation system burdened by gridlock, fatal accidents and a polluted environment. The authors cannot overstate the importance of CVs in solving long-standing mobility issues and making travel safer and more convenient. It is high time to explore vehicular networks in detail to suggest solutions to the challenges encountered by these highly dynamic networks.

This paper compiles research on various V2X topics, from a comprehensive overview of V2X networks to their unique characteristics and challenges. In doing so, the authors identify multiple issues encountered by V2X communication networks due to their open communication nature and high mobility, especially from a security perspective. Thus, this paper proposes a trust-based model to secure vehicular networks. The proposed approach uses the communicating nodes’ behavior to establish trustworthy relationships. The proposed model only allows trusted nodes to communicate among themselves while isolating malicious nodes to achieve secure communication.

Despite the benefits offered by V2X networks, they have associated challenges. As the number of CVs on the roads increase, so does the attack surface. Connected cars provide numerous safety-critical applications that, if compromised, can result in fatal consequences. While cryptographic mechanisms effectively prevent external attacks, various studies propose trust-based models to complement cryptographic solutions for dealing with internal attacks. While numerous trust-based models have been proposed, there is room for improvement in malicious node detection and complexity. Optimizing the number of nodes considered in trust calculation can reduce the complexity of state-of-the-art solutions. The theoretical analysis of the proposed model exhibits an improvement in trust calculation, better malicious node detection and fewer computations.

The proposed model is the first to add another dimension to trust calculation by incorporating opinions about recommender nodes. The added dimension improves the trust calculation resulting in better performance in thwarting attacks and enhancing security while also reducing the trust calculation complexity.

The struggle for racial justice has always faced significant challenges and controversies across interpersonal, intergroup and structural levels. As racism continues to evolve and adapt to new social, political and technological developments, researchers, activists and practitioners grapple with complex and intersecting issues. This chapter discusses some of the ongoing challenges anti-racist endeavours face today. It engages with contemporary global issues, such as international migration, globalisation and the digital revolution that have implications on the fight against racism. The chapter covers topics such as the recent backlashes against anti-racism, the emergence of the ‘colour-blind’ ideology and the challenges anti-racism faces in the realm of technological advance and digital spaces. Additionally, this chapter explores the discourse of decolonisation as a radical approach to anti-racism. It concludes with a critical discussion of the idea that mainstreaming and expanding anti-racism to include racial majorities may enhance its effectiveness.

When companies face a crisis, they sometimes deliver blame-shifting communications, trying to shift blame onto another actor to protect their reputation. While previous research has considered how different features of the message affect its persuasiveness, little is known about whether specific senders can blame more effectively. This paper aims to contribute to research in this domain through an investigation of the sender’s social perception as a critical moderator to the persuasiveness of blame shifting.

The authors conduct four between-subjects scenario experiments to test the research hypotheses. In each experiment, participants are presented with a realistic crisis scenario and the crisis communications delivered by the company. The authors assess the extent to which perceptions of the sender influence the message’s ability to reduce negative word-of-mouth intentions and to increase purchase intentions.

The authors show that blame shifting is more likely to be effective when deployed by senders that are small (Study 1) or have a positive CSR track record (Study 2). Furthermore, The authors find that even large senders can successfully deploy blame shifting if they can benefit from being known for their CSR programs (Study 3). Finally, the authors show that the effect of blame shifting depends on the receiver’s level of concern about the crisis: stakeholders significantly concerned by the crisis reject blame-shifting communications (Study 4).

Further research should examine the impact of information about brand competence on blame-shifting effectiveness. Further research is also needed to explore sender effects for other defensive crisis communication strategies such as denial or the use of excuses or justifications.

The study offers critical information for marketers considering the use of defensive crisis communications strategies such as blame shifting.

The study extends the understanding of how sender effects influence blame-shifting communications. The analysis allows us to clarify why this strategy is effective for certain senders and certain receivers while, for others, it tends to backfire. Blame shifting backfires for large senders unless they can boast a strong CSR record.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyze the adoption of digital technologies in the banking industry and its impact on the rise of digital fraudulent activities, specifically focusing on online banking frauds. This paper aims to provide insights into the current technologies implemented by banks to secure their online banking systems and explores the methods used by cybercriminals to exploit security vulnerabilities in these systems.

In order to understand how digital technologies in banking can be secured against online fraud, this research conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) on digital banking, online banking fraud, and security measurements. The review encompasses a variety of sources from online databases such as Emerald Insight, Google Scholar, IEEE, JSTOR, Springer and Science Direct.

The key finding of the paper is that the adoption of digital technologies in the banking industry has led to a significant increase in digital fraudulent activities, particularly in the form of online banking frauds. This paper emphasizes that these frauds have become a global concern and have evolved into an industry where cybercriminals use sophisticated tools such as phishing attacks, denial-of-service attacks, Trojan horses, malware infections, identity theft and computer viruses.

This study relies solely on a literature review without incorporating primary data or case studies; therefore, it might miss out on the firsthand experiences and perspectives of banks and cybersecurity professionals.

This study emphasizes the need for banks to adopt advanced security measures to safeguard their online banking systems.

This study underscores the importance of ongoing training and awareness programs for both bank employees and customers.

This study specifically addresses the adoption of digital technologies in the banking industry and its correlation with the increase in digital fraudulent activities. This focus on the intersection of technology and fraud in the banking sector is a distinctive aspect. This study conducts a SLR to examine the current technologies implemented by banks to safeguard their online banking systems. This comprehensive approach provides insights into the diverse security measures used by banks to protect against various types of cyber threats.

The purpose of this study is to assess psychological distress among parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), self-esteem as a predictor of such distress and the effect of coping strategies.

A descriptive correlational study design was conducted using a convenient sample of parents of ASD children (N = 93).

This study revealed that the parents of an ASD child experienced a high level of anxiety (M = 15.89), a moderate level of depression (M = 15.85) and a mild level of stress (M = 16.86). Parents of ASD children also reported a low self-esteem score (M= 13.27). Mothers of ASD children reported higher levels of psychological distress, lower levels of self-esteem and more frequent utilisation of maladaptive coping strategies than fathers of ASD children.

Parents of children with ASD experience a significant level of psychological distress; however, this may be improved by developing programmes and psychological interventions focused on improving parents’ self-esteem and using more active coping strategies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study conducted in Saudi Arabia that predict the psychological status among family caregivers of an autistic child.

This concluding chapter summarises the main themes and topics discussed in this book, synthesising the key issues facing contemporary anti-racism efforts. It reflects on a possible anti-racist future(s) in a context of greater sociocultural affiliations and more interconnected local and global environments. Ideas about race and ethnicity have adapted, and racial hierarchies, structures and processes continuously shape the way social groups engage, interact and live with difference. This raises questions regarding the enduring influence of race and racism. What will the state of multiracial societies be in the evolving digital economy that has transformed the structural and institutional environment affecting everyday life? What kind of an anti-racist future can be imagined that will contribute to ensuring greater social equity? This chapter ponders on a range of possibilities to chart directions towards an anti-racist future that fosters increased intercultural understanding for relational engagements across difference. It draws conclusions and lessons for an anti-racist future and lays out some directions for future research.