Critical Infrastructure Protection-How to Assess the Protection Efficiency

The paper presents a concept how to assess the effectiveness of critical infrastructure protection systems. At the beginning the main issues related to critical infrastructure protection are discussed, like resilience, interdependencies, dire phenomena caused by them, and risk management. Next, the state of the art is reviewed. It embraces frameworks, methods and tools related to infrastructures protection, especially risk management. The paper extends the researches of the EU CIRAS project beyond the risk management issue, proposing a method to assess the effectiveness of countermeasures selected for implementation. The concept is based on supplementing the risk management framework by incident management, incident statistics and effectiveness indicators presenting relevant parameters for decisions makers. To implement this concept, the CIRAS risk management software platform should be extended. Main categories of statistics and indicators dedicated for critical infrastructures are proposed. In the conclusion the concept is summarized and future works related to its validation is specified.