Unlike many countries and regions, Western Europe and the US depend extremely heavily upon their Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) to live and to operate. Electrical power is generally taken for granted, but when interruptions do happen the result is chaos. A power outage affected many areas of the UK this week and caused chaos and major disruption with industry, the transport system and even hospital operations suffering serious impact.It is not only the control systems that are at risk, but also weak points within the overall infrastructure - and when these are knocked out, recovery could take days. For a society so dependent upon continuity of supply the effects can clearly be devastating.
To read an interesting report on this incident from the UK Times newspaper, please follow this link:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilities/article4023634.ece
And if you don’t have security and business continuity plans in place to allow you to protect and recover, maybe now is the time to think about it.
For details of ARC's Critical Infrastructure Security Course go to:
