Cyber risk of coordinated attacks in critical infrastructures

Abstract

Critical infrastructures such as the electric grid, oil refineries, telecommunications, transportation, water, emergency services, etc., all depend on some cyber infrastructure. Risk analysis of a critical infrastructure to compromised cyber infrastructure is therefore very important, but has certain challenges. This paper examines the problem of integrating analysis of a cyber network with the impacts possible on the critical infrastructures that are possible through cyber access. We find that adding the infrastructure impact cost considerably increases the complexity of the assessment problem.