Page 135 - Cyber Terrorism and Extremism as Threat to Critical Infrastructure Protection

ALEXANDRU GEORGESCU, ADRIAN VICTOR VEVERA, CARMEN ELENA CÎRNU: A CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION
PERSPECTIVE ON COUNTER-TERRORISM IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

sectors of the economy, including banking and finance, transport, energy, water, health, food
and grocery and communications. It also includes key government services, manufacturing
and supply chains. The ubiquitous nature of CI and our collective reliance on it means that
protecting and ensuring its continuity is essential to the nation’s economic prosperity, national
security and social wellbeing”. CI must therefore be protected from a wide variety of risks,
vulnerabilities and threats; the latter may be either deliberate or accidental, natural or artifi-
cial, localized or distant, contained or systemic, and so on. The figure below describes the
main dimensions through which critical infrastructures and their relationships to each other
and their security environments are defined.

Figure 1: The main concepts of the CIP framework (Source: Rinaldi et al., 2001)

This article does not propose to offer a comprehensive view of the issues, but we will highlight
the features of CIP which contribute to its usefulness. We will explore the interdependencies
between infrastructure components and the infrastructures themselves. These interdependen-
cies may be physical, geographical, informational, cybernetic, sectorial, political/policy and
social (Gheorghe & Schläpfer, 2006), though other taxonomies exist. These interdependen-

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