Page 137 - 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

keep up with shifts in the security environment, while weak regulations and liability laws
incentivize underinvestment in infrastructure security by owners/operators;
• The regional economic transition has also, historically, meant that governments have
little experience in crafting regulations that keep in mind the differences in incentives
and organizational cultures between authorities and CI owners/operators, many of them
private, as well as the Public-Private Partnerships which CIP activities call for;
• A challenging security environment which, as explained previously, is also conducive to
terrorist operations;
• The general complexity of the area, especially with the co-existence on the ground of
projects by the EU, NATO, the Russian Federation, China etc;
• The perspective of significant infrastructure inventory change in the next period, through
projects fostered by the Belt and Road Initiative (or the 17+1 Initiative of cooperation be-
tween China and its Central and Eastern European Partners) or by the Three Seas Initiative.
Both of these initiatives are focused on cross-border connectivity for economic growth;
• Deriving from this, we have the issue that almost all European countries face, which is
the simultaneous existence of several generations of critical infrastructures, in terms of
age, systems of control, status of investment in maintenance, usable remaining lifespan,
creating new challenges to governance and new vulnerabilities and fragilities exploitable
through terrorist action.

2.2 Critical Infrastructure Protection Governance

The concept of governance refers to the rules, organizations, structures, hierarchies and prin-
ciples which guide and govern decision-making. Figure 2 shows a basic CIP framework at
national level, modelled after that of Romania.

Figure 2: A simplified view of a CIP framework (Source: Mureșan & Georgescu, 2015)

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