Damages caused by an attack on a Critical Infrastructure (CI) can be widespread, massive, and highly correlated, affecting multiple sectors of the economy and in summary, the impact of a coordinated physical attack, a deliberate (cyber) disruption of critical automation systems, or even a combined scenario including several kinds of attacks, could have disastrous consequences for the European Member States’ regions economies and social wellbeing in general.
PRAETORIAN has the strategic goal to increase the security and resilience of European CIs, facilitating the coordinated protection of interrelated CI against combined physical and cyber threats. The project provides an installation-specific toolset that supports the security managers of CIs in their decision-making to anticipate and withstand potential cyber, physical or combined security threats to their own infrastructures and other interrelated CIs that could have a severe impact on their performance and/or the security of the population in their vicinity. PRAETORIAN specifically tackles (i.e. prevent, detect, respond and, in case of a declared attack, mitigate) human-made cyber and physical attacks affecting a CI, so the CI operator can appreciate an improved situation awareness and can make a decision on how to activate the protection mechanisms. Moreover, PRAETORIAN also addresses how an attack or incident in a specific CI can jeopardise the normal operation of other neighbouring/interrelated CIs, and how to make all of them more resilient, by predicting cascading effects and proposing a unified response among CIs and assisting First Responder teams.
Specific objectives:
•Evaluate the hazards and minimize their level of risk by assessing the vulnerabilities of targeted sectors and designing adequate security measures
•Improve the understanding of any physical or cyber threats and their consequences in the interdependent network of critical infrastructures
•Improve the resilience of the CIs, their neighbouring population and environment and enable a coordinated response to an attack
•Share with the public pertinent information on the risks associated with an event and the emergency response actions planned to overcome the incident
•Validate the project results in real contexts of interdependent CIs to improve their efficiency, cost-effectiveness and societal benefit
•Ensure compliance of the solutions with the legal, ethical, privacy, and societal principles, including recommendations to policy planners as well as disseminate results to the relevant communities of users, to promote the adoption of the proposed cost-effective solutions beyond the project participants.
