Critical Infrastructure Protection

Critical infrastructure refers to the assets that provide vital services required to sustain the public health and safety of a population and protect the security and economic well-being of a nation.

In Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21), the United States designated the following 16 critical infrastructure sectors: Chemical; Commercial Facilities; Communications; Critical Manufacturing; Dams; Defense Industrial Base; Emergency Services; Energy; Financial Services; Food and Agriculture; Governmental Facilities; Healthcare and Public Health; Information Technology; Nuclear Reactors, Materials, and Waste; Transportation Systems; and Water and Wastewater Systems.

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems as well as industrial control systems (ICS) are in the Information Technology sector. These are critical systems that must be protected, as they can affect a wide range of services, from the flow of electricity to the operations and control of commercial transportation.

References

US Department of Homeland Security (n.d.). Critical infrastructure sectors.  https://www.dhs.gov/what-critical-infrastructure

White House. (2013). Presidential Policy Directive 21: Critical infrastructure security and resilience.  US Government Printing Office.

Check Your Knowledge

Choose the best answer to each question:
Question 1
The SCADA acronym stands for which of the following?
supervisory control and data acquisition
supervisory centralization and data acquisitions
supervisory control and data authorization
supervisory conversion and data authentication
Question 2
Which of the following are often found in the industrial control sectors of the United States' critical infrastructure?
industrial control systems (ICSs)
supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems
programmable logic controllers (PLC)
all of the above
Question 3
Which of the following can be classified as the most serious threat to control systems?
hostile governments
terrorist groups
disgruntled employees
natural disasters
all of the above
Question 4
Which of the following documents was initiated as a high-priority project in cooperation with the public and private sector ICS community to develop specific guidance on the application of the security controls?
ISO 8822 standard
NIST SP 800-53
IEEE 802 Working Groups
ISO 9576 standard
Question 5
Which of the following directives is a policy to strengthen, maintain, and secure a resilient critical infrastructure in the United States?
Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21)
Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD-8)
Presidential Policy Directive 25 (PPD-25)
Presidential Policy Directive 1 (PPD-1)
Question 6
Which of the following are part of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors, defined by the Department of Homeland Security, whose assets, systems, and networks are considered so vital to the United States that their destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health, or safety?
Dam Sector
Financial Systems Sector
Transportation Systems Sector
only Financial Systems and Transportation Systems sectors
Dam, Financial Systems, and Transportation Systems sectors