SETTING THE STAGE: THE VULNERABILITY OF CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES

摘要

The infrastructures of modern society are big, interconnected and crucial for the daily life of the citizens, i.e. critical, socio-technical infrastructures. Examples: Power network, transportation networks, data and telecommunication networks. The infrastructures can be modelled using graphs. Threats can be of different kinds: Nature, technical, human error 'hackers' and antagonistic threats - terrorism and war. These threats might result in system collapses. The vulnerability of a system is the probability (conditional) of a system collapse. Acts of terrorism might destroy an infrastructure or cause chaos by threatening to do this. Terrorists usually form a mostly unknown network, which wish to destroy a critical infrastructure, which is known to them, i.e. a fight between two networks.