Protecting critical information infrastructures

As governments and corporations learn to operate in the Information Age environment, it is becoming ever more evident that the Information Society will not progress unless it is built on secure foundations. The dependability and robustness of large scale networked information systems is already a cause for concern but the rapid growth of E-business and E-government, which are critically dependent on these infrastructures, has placed trustworthiness firmly onto the corporate and political agenda. However, devising policies to protect critical information infrastructures will require not only new thinking but also new modes of partnership across sectors and across borders. Ways need to be found of engaging all actors, and encouraging thrill to work together to secure information infrastructures through enlightened self-interest. This paper explores the complex requirements of partnership, ill the hope that an understanding of the issues carl help stakeholders in the Information Society to better protect themselves and their logical neighbours. The 'information revolution' is centred around the drive to research, develop, produce and exploit advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Key technological developments include the digitization of information, the widespread penetration of computing, increases in computing power, the merging of computing with telecommunications and increases in bandwidth that enable ubiquitous networking. Taken together, these developments ill information gathering, processing. storage, retrieval and dissemination provide the technological underpinnings for the emergence of Information Societies in which the nature and role and information are radically different from the Cast. As with previous technological 'revolutions', technology itself is not necessarily the primary variable leading to change. Rather, the organizational, conceptual and doctrinal impacts of the technologies provide the medium by which technological change translates into wider social change. For commerce, a decade of back office automation is giving way to a drive to automate the front-end, both between businesses and between business and the consumer. The network effect and the highly competitive nature of this type of business are driving the revolution onwards. For governments, the information revolution makes possible the modernization of government, hence in the UK, the Blair government's drives for "joined-up government" and "government.direct."(2) The notion is that both the core businesses of central government and the services delivered to the public can be enhanced by the adoption of networked technologies supported by appropriate procedures and structures. This 'information revolution' has a number of security implications: . Nation states, economies and citizens are becoming ever more reliant on Networked Information Systems (NIS) which are vulnerable to attack. As dependence increases, so the results of attacks become potentially more disruptive. The nature of these systems and the possible modes of cyber-attack, meanwhile, mean that the capability of carrying out attacks is proliferating and that it is tremendously difficult to identify attackers and to distinguish between electronic vandals at one end of the spectrum and nation state aggressors at the other. . Economic globalization, the proliferation of information technologies and developments in the global media mean that, on the one hand, it is increasingly hard for states to impose controls on the media to which their citizens are exposed. On the other, arguably, it is increasingly easy for states or groups to use propaganda, disinformation or psychological operations in order to achieve their strategic, political or economic goals. . The information revolution land other strategic pressures on Western armed forces) is leading to a Revolution in military affairs. This involves the exploitation of advanced technologies to develop new doctrines, organizations and modes of war that allow conventional armed forces to be smaller, more lethal, operate at a higher tempo and to react more rapidly over long distances.(3)