Bridget R. Kane, Stephen Webber, Katherine H. Tucker, Sam Wallace, Joan Chang, Devin McCarthy, Dennis Murphy, Daniel Egel, Tom Wingfield
Critical infrastructure in the United States supports the prosperity of the nation and its people. It permeates the daily lives of citizens, underpinning the safety and security of the general public and ensuring the economic of the general public and ensuring the economic well-being of the nation, yet the health of these assets, systems, networks, and facilities is often taken for granted. In 1997, the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection wrote, “life is good in America because things work . . . we are able to assume that things will work because our infrastructures are highly developed and highly effective.”1 But what if things did not work? What points of systems weakness exist, and how do these weaknesses contributeto opportunities for the destruction or disruptionof critical resources and essential services?
In this report, we analyze threats and hazards to critical infrastructure and examine the vectors by which an adversary might conduct attacks against the homeland. We also look at the cascading effects of an attack and other impacts resulting from infrastructure age and maintenance and from weather challenges. These threats are demonstrated across critical infrastructures on a daily basis, but it is easy to become desensitized to such risks and vulnerabilities—particularly when not presented as part of a holistic picture of threats in aggregate. Here, we offer characterizations of various types of threat actors and vectors to raise awareness of systemic vulnerabilities and threat environments that can affect our critical infrastructure.
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