Critical infrastructure protection

While it is widely accepted that cyber threats qualify as one of the major security issues of our time, their real scope has been appreciated only recently. In particular, as seen most vividly with the 2017 spread of Wannacry ransomware, cyber offenders pose a serious societal threat. For this reason, Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) is increasingly being mentioned in national security documents all over the world. In this chapter we will present a broad overview of the current literature on the topic. We will thus begin by providing a concise description of the infrastructures that are currently deemed critical, with a view to showing the complexities of CIP; we will then review the main policies devised in the US and the European Union (EU) to secure Critical Infrastructures (CIs). Finally, in the concluding section, we will draw our conclusions and discuss future avenues of research.