Report on challenges for SCIs

Abstract

This report discusses the challenges posed by four types of threats – terrorist attacks, cyber-attacks, extreme weather and social unrest – on the following eight smart critical infrastructure systems:a. ALPHA - Finance (financial system): The analysis focuses on disturbed information flow and disabling/manipulating IT and communication systems, including attacks on the “physical layer” using the example of IEMI/HPEM threats, as well as the software layer.b. BRAVO - Energy supply (system): The analysis focuses on disruption of “smart” energy supply in a “smart city”, caused by natural hazards, in this case flooding, leading to cascading effects and severe consequences for other energy-depending SCIs.c. CHARLIE - Health care (system): Focus of the analysis is on all threats that might cause large increases in the numbers of injuries or sick patients within a densely populated area. This will include indirect impacts, e.g. large numbers of injuries caused by a disaster or terrorist attacks or disease epidemics, but also direct impacts, e.g. service disruptions in critical health infrastructures, such as hospitals, due to attacks or disasters hitting the infrastructure itself.d. DELTA - Transportation (system) – airports: According to the framework situation, threats on Smart Airports will be assessed under circumstances of (i) blocked traffic, (ii) passenger and airplane traffic exceeding capacity (iii) flood.e. ECHO - Industry (in zones in cities) "Industrial Production Plants": The analysis focuses mainly on technological accidents within the refinery complex, but also accidents caused by natural hazards affecting refinery property outside the main refinery complex, e.g. accident on jetty belonging to refinery on the river Danube during unloading/loading oil products from barge to a tank, damages by a gale or storm on process installations (pipes, hoses) resulting in river pollution. Both scenarios could lead to cascading effects for other SCIs in close vicinity.f. FOXTROT - Water supply (systems): The analysis focuses on three cases of local and regional drinking water supply chains, with different kinds of vulnerabilities in terms of climate threats, ICT challenges, security issues and human error.g. GOLF - Urban flood protection (systems): The analysis focuses in the disruption of water and transport caused through tidal and fluvial flooding events.h. HOTEL: City of Helsinki - Flooding underground coal storage. Resilience of the energy infrastructure (city environment). The way this analysis was conducted was by assessing these threats using a 5x5 framework matrix. The two axes of the matrix were phases (understand risks, anticipate/prepare, absorb/withstand, respond/recover, adapt/learn) and dimensions (system/physical, information/data, organizational/business, societal/political, cognitive/decision-making). Each individual matrix block was discussed by subject experts who identified specific challenges and implications for each matrix element and rated its relevance (high, medium, low).In terms of the results, the system/physical dimension received the highest number of important challenges. Overall, the most important singular element was to understand risks in the organizational/business dimension. The least importance was attributed to the adapt/learn phase.SmartResilience: Smart Resilience Indicators for Smart Critical Infrastructure