Information Security and Critical Infrastructure Protection

More than 1.5 billion people in over 200 countries now spend a great deal of time in cyberspace. We work and shop there. We are educated and entertained there. We socialize with family, friends, and strangers in cyberspace. We are paid and we pay others through this medium. Tens of millions of commercial enterprises, and local, state, national, and international agencies do their business there. It has become a critical infrastructure in its own right, and it is embedded in almost all other critical infrastructures.

Cyberspace and the internet in particular, are notoriously vulnerable to a frightening and expanding range of accidents, attacks, and other forms of misuse by a spectrum of hackers, criminals, terrorists, and state actors who have been empowered by unprecedented access to more people and organizations than has ever been the case with any infrastructure in history. It is thus very much in the interests of public safety, critical infrastructure protection, and national and international security to have a safer and more secure cyberspace. The forms and extent of global connectivity make cybersecurity an intrinsic and difficult transnational problem.

CISTP interest in the national and international dimensions of cybersecurity include:

  • The emerging institutional landscape of organizations and laws trying to deal with malicious activities in cyberspace.
  • International conventions for critical information infrastructure protection.
  • National stategies for protecting cyberspace.
  • Helping less developed countries build national cybersecurity capabilities.
  • Risks and exposures in offshoring software development and information services.
  • Identity management in next generation global networks.
  • Surveillance and lawful interception.

The publication Global Initiatives to Secure Cyberspace: An Emerging Landscape (2008), is a virtual database of organizations that address cyber security on the global or regional scale and contains articles on such organizations. Each article contains information about the organization being described including a basic overview, the scope of the organization's involvement, previous and current projects, and contact information.