Analytics for Protecting Critical Infrastructure

The terrorist attacks in September 2001 have changed the perception of critical infrastructure security. These attacks were characterised not only by sophistication of planning and execution but as well the selection of targets – a diverse set of critical infrastructure buildings that included government, defence and commerce [1]. Those were followed shortly by London bombings and attack on trains in Spain, proving that complex attacks on critical infrastructure are becoming a new trend in terrorism [2]. In this paper we review the key trends related to application of information technology and, in particular, automated data analysis to the challenge of protecting critical infrastructure. We focus on technologies that use automated data collection and analyses that can be exploited for improving security provision for critical infrastructure in the future. Of our particular interest are technologies that are at relatively early stage of adaptation and in our judgement have potential to significantly change how the security is provided in the future. We mostly focus our discussion on technologies that support physical aspect of security: biometric technologies, video analytics, sensors and integration/data fusion. Then we briefly discuss the big data and analytics in the context of big data. Finally, we discuss analytics in context of cyber-security. We focus on the man-made threats to critical infrastructure. These are typically divided into two categories: physical threats and cyber threats. We want to emphasise that this division does not imply that these two categories are separate; in fact, one should expect that more sophisticated attacks in the future should combine the two domains. 2. Data for analytics and security