Critical National Infrastructure

Critical infrastructure (or critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the UK) is a term used by governments to describe assets that are essential for the functioning of a society and economy – the infrastructure. Most commonly associated with the term are facilities for:

The European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP) has been laid out in EU Directives by the Commission (EU COM(2006) 786 final).

It has proposed a list of European critical infrastructures based upon inputs by its member states.

Each designated European Critical Infrastructures (ECI) will have to have an Operator Security Plan (OSP) covering the identification of important assets, a risk analysis based on major threat scenarios and the vulnerability of each asset, and the identification, selection and prioritisation of counter-measures and procedures.

The German critical-infrastructure protection programme is coordinated by the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Some of its special agencies like the German Federal Office for Information Security or the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance BBK deliver the respective content, e.g., about IT systems.

In the UK, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) provides information, personnel and physical security advice to the businesses and organisations which make up the UK's national infrastructure, helping to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism and other threats.

It can call on resources from other government departments and agencies, including MI5, the Communications-Electronics Security Group and other government departments responsible for national infrastructure sectors.

The USA has had a wide-reaching critical infrastructure protection program in place since 1996. Its Patriot Act of 2001 defined critical infrastructure as those "systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters."

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