The threat of cascading failures across critical infrastructures has been identified as a key challenge for governments. Cascading failure is seen as potentially catastrophic, extremely difficult to predict and increasingly likely to happen. Infrastructures are largely privately operated and private actors are thought to under-invest in mitigating this threat. Consequently, experts have demanded a more dominant role for government, including the use of regulation. Empirical evidence on cascading failure is, however, extremely scarce. This paper analyses new data drawn from news reports on incidents. We find that, contrary to current thinking, cascades are not rare. Neither do they indicate a wide array of unknown dependencies across infrastructures. Rather, we find a small number of focused, unidirectional pathways around two infrastructures: energy and telecommunications. We also found that most cascades were stopped quickly, in contrast to the oft-cited 'domino effect'. These findings undermine the case for more intrusive public oversight of critical infrastructures.

No abstract

One type of threat consistently identified as a key challenge for Critical Infrastructure Protection (CEP) 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.

This paper describes a model for expressing critical infrastructure dependencies. The model addresses the limitations of existing approaches with respect to clarity of definition, support for quality and the influence of operating states of critical infrastructures and environmental factors.

This chapter introduces the concept of Critical Infrastructure (CI). Although old civilisations had CI, the protection and resilience of CI has come to the fore again in the last two decades. The risk to society due to inadvertent and deliberate CI disruptions has largely increased due to interrelation, complexity, and dependencies of these infrastructures. The increased use of information and telecommunication technologies (ICT) to support, monitor, and control CI functionalities has contributed to this. The interest in CI and complex systems is strongly related to initiatives by several governments that from the end of the 90s of the previous century recognised the relevance of the undisturbed functioning of CI for the wellbeing of their population, economy, and so on. Their policies highlighted early the increasing complexity of CI and the challenges of providing such CI services without disruption, especially when accidental or malicious events occur. In recent years, most national policies have evolved following a direction from protection towards resilience. The need for this shift in perspective and these concepts are also analysed in this chapter.