Citation

Luiijf HAM, Nieuwenhuijs AH. Int. J. Crit. Infrastruct. 2008; 4(4): 409-417.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Inderscience Publishers)

DOI

10.1504/IJCIS.2008.020159

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The European Union-sponsored project Vital Infrastructure Threats and Assurance (VITA) has the objective of exploring and showing new paths in Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) R&D. This paper describes one of VITA's results: the idea and the development of a novel extensible and generic threat taxonomy for Critical Infrastructures (CIs). Over 300 threats have been categorised. The threat taxonomy makes a sharp distinction between threats, threat cause categories (nature, human or both) and human intent. It is shown that activism, sabotage and terror threats should be regarded as an expression of human intent combined with other existing threats. The taxonomy helps to select in a balanced way all the all-hazard threats which may threaten existing CIs.