Page 95 - Cyber Terrorism and Extremism as Threat to Critical Infrastructure Protection

1 Hyper Threats to Critical Infrastructures

in the Region of South-Eastern Europe:
A Wake-Up Call for South-Eastern

European Leadership

Metodi Hadji-Janev

1 Introduction

The security environment has changed dramatically over the past few years. This change
is ongoing and is happening faster than South-Eastern European (SEE) leaders think. The
change is occurring in terms of diplomacy and global political competition, economics, mod-
ern technologies and innovation, and in the context of security and military affairs. These
changes, put together, have affected the monopoly of power previously granted to states and
organizations that states have formed. Thanks to the general power shift, non-state actors can
asymmetrically challenge nation-states from cyber and physical space, and thus interfere in
strategic affairs, influence policy and decision-making, and consequently produce organiza-
tional and conceptual changes to security in the SEE countries and around the globe.

Hence, policies to identify and protect critical infrastructure (CI) or critical information in-
frastructure (CII), among others, have dominated SEE diplomatic, policy and security elites
over the past decade. Focusing on critical infrastructure protection (CIP) or critical informa-
tion infrastructure protection (CIIP) to some degree has resulted in a loss of the sense of
geopolitical awareness. Nevertheless, the rise of emerging state actors with hybrid types of
regime, internal EU fatigue, NATO internal latent competition, and advances in information
and communication technologies (ICT) are unequivocally introducing geopolitics into the
SEE policymaking calculus. Moreover, hybrid base threats blending the peace and war types
of activities coming from both cyber and physical space and with methods that exploit modern
society’s vulnerabilities have become a dominant concern for the democratic governments in
the region of SEE.

One specific segment of the geostrategic competition that has so far not been addressed prop-
erly is the artificial intelligence (AI) race. The quest for efficiency is introducing AI into
everyday lives faster than SEE policy and security makers can imagine. AI is expected to en-

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