Critical Infrastructure Analysis

Abstract

On 28 June 1914 it was a beautiful day in Sarajevo, Bosnia where crowds lined the streets to receive the arrival of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Archduke had been sent to Sarajevo to oversee military training in the region despite hostile sentiment in the area. While the Archduke and his wife Sophie rode in the motorcade to the capital building, extremist known as the Young Bosnians lined the street with intent to assassinate the Archduke. Multiple attempts were made along the motorcade but were unsuccessful. It would be fate that the driver of the Archduke’s car would take a wrong turn during the escape and stall the vehicle right in front of a man by the name of Gavrilo Princip. Gavrilo, realizing the opportunity in front of him and armed with a small pistol fired two rounds into the Archduke’s car hitting him in the neck and Sophie in the abdomen. Gavrilo was 20 years old at the time, engulfed in his extremist mindset established by those in the Young Bosnian group an unbeknownst created a defining moment in world history. The malevolent actions conducted on this day would throw the world into a state of chaos that would come to be World War One. Although surreptitious, this scenario parallels a situation unfolding across the cyber domain as it relates to critical infrastructure. The actions of a single young man on a seemingly normal day would be the catalyst for hundreds of thousands of casualties. Tomorrow, the actions of a few young individuals acting on behalf of a state actor disable the electric grid for an entire country. A single cyber-attack on an electric grid may yield the same kinetic potential as the rounds fired from Gavrilo’s pistol. Attacks against the nation’s critical infrastructures is a matter of “when”, not “if” (Brasso, 2016, para. 2). The threat to critical infrastructure is tangible as these systems are generally insecure, lack proper top-down policy support, and provides a perfect conduit to wage asymmetric maneuver warfare. This paper will aim to discuss the definition of critical infrastructure, analyze current sentiment in the industry, and deconstruct government actions taken in the United States while comparing these to Germany.