The creation of information and telecommunication systems with the integration of information transmission, reception and processing functions determines the need to find technical solutions to ensure its security and protection while increasing the intensity of information processes, improving technologies for unauthorized access to information areas and creating destructive effects. Joint fulfillment of requirements for information security and maintaining operational properties of the system, which regulate efficiency, efficiency and resource intensity of information exchange, is achieved in accordance with a minimum-margin rule, the essence of which is to find the maximum possible information losses and determine a strategy for achieving minimum values of these losses. Within the framework of the used approach, the best solution is to establish a set of parameters of transmitting and receiving devices and information processing means with the lowest loss value of the target function of information exchange under the most dangerous and effective destructive effects. Goal – justification of the criterion for construction and strategy of functioning of the information and telecommunication system with protection against destructive effects. The criterion of construction and strategy of operation of the information and telecommunication system are justified in order to achieve the best probabilistic-time indicators of information exchange with a balanced set of measures to ensure security and information protection in case of destructive impacts. Due to the variety and variability of the conditions for the manifestation of destabilizing factors, the parameters and reconfiguration schemes of telecommunication channels, as well as the operating modes of information processing devices, were established while achieving the effectiveness of meeting the information needs of subscribers according to the optimality criterion and setting indicators of the efficiency and resource consumption of the system according to the suitability criterion. Possibilities and options for adaptive, situational and reflective control of the information and telecommunication system in the interests of rational distribution of the information resource to achieve target functions and the use of technologies for ensuring security and protecting information from destructive influences are investigated. Automatic control of the system is at the stage of prohibiting destructive effects on the information area by maintaining components in states that most fully correspond to the goals and objectives of information exchange. Situational control of information security during transmission and reception, used, as a rule, at an early stage of implementation of the conflict component in the information process, is based on the identification of destabilizing factors based on the results of classification of current states and neutralization of threats due to the restructuring of the system operation regulations carried out. Reflexive control, the strategy of which is based on prediction and evaluation of changes in the parameters of information processes under destructive effects, is in the form of transferring components of the information and telecommunication system to the state of its own information equilibrium, which helps to maximize the target function of information exchange while minimizing the performance indicators of destructive effects carried out. Due to the expediency of consistent implementation of the above control strategies in assessing the degree of occurrence of threats to the information process, the vector of parameters of information objects and telecommunication channels must from the conditions for neutralizing the full set of predicted destabilizing factors be determined. A reasonable criterion for building an information and telecommunication system makes it possible to jointly search for technical solutions for creating receiving and transmitting devices and information processing means in order to achieve maximum performance indicators of information exchange under established limitations of efficiency and resource intensity. The developed rule for selecting the strategy for controlling components of the information and telecommunication system establishes time-frequency and space-energy distributions of information processes necessary to meet the information needs of subscribers when transmitting, receiving and processing information in different conditions for the manifestation of destructive threats. The obtained results form a methodological basis for building information and telecommunication systems with protection of information coming through their channels with increasing requirements for target functions of information exchange and strengthening system restrictions due to improvement of technologies for unauthorized access to information areas and creation of destructive effects.