Empirical findings on critical infrastructure dependencies in Europe

Abstract

One type of threat consistently identified as a key challenge for Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) is that of cascading effects caused by dependencies and interdependencies across different critical infrastructures (CI) and their services. This paper draws on a hitherto untapped data source on infrastructure dependencies: a daily maintained database containing over 2375 serious incidents in different CI all over the world as reported by news media. In this paper we analyse this data to discover patterns in CI failures in Europe like cascades, dependencies, and interdependencies. Some analysis results indicate that less sectors than many dependency models suggest drive cascading outages and that cascading effects due to interdependencies are hardly reported. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.