Week 06: CI Sector Overview Flashcards
What are Canada’s 10 sectors of Critical Infrastructure?
- Energy and Utilities
- Finance
- Food
- Transportation
- Government
- Information and Communication Technology
- Health
- Water
- Safety
- Manufacturing
What are the characteristics of the Energy and Utilities Sector?
Energy is critically important to the Canadian economy. Canada is among the largest energy producers & the highest per-capita energy consumers in the world because of our climate and resources.
What are the components of the Energy and Utilities Sector?
Electrical power, natural gas, oil production and transmission systems.
What are some concerns for the Energy and Utilities Sector? (5)
- Vastness
- Complexity
- Interdependency
- Cross-border
- Private sector (including considerations for competitiveness)
What are the characteristics and components of the Finance sector?
Majority of Financial institutions are privately owned except for central banks & some insurance firms as state owned enterprises (Crown Corp.)
Other key actors in the CI are financial regulators (Gov’t) to ensure economic welfare, risk sharing, and capital allocations; and Finance is key for economic activity within a country and ability to lend credit.
What are some of the risks that face the Finance sector? (5)
- Central banks are critical component to CI to ensure liquidity, money supply as well as to ensure commercial banks maintain a certain percentage of assets as capital.
- Improper ratios or poor quality assets (e.g. housing) can undermine banks and create instability (e.g., runs on a bank)
- Availability, confidentiality, data integrity, security/authentication, non-repudiation, communications across the financial sector via public and private clouds (e.g. Interact e-transfer via e-mail or text)
- Reliance on public internet to connect the financial CI together and ensures cost effectiveness however leads to critical information infrastructures (CII)
- CIIs result in becoming a target of cyber threats
What are some concerns for the Finance Sector? (3)
- Disruption of financial activities
- Closure of stock markets
- Cyber-attack on financial system - inability to use ATMs or credit cards
What are the characteristics and components of the Food sector?
Vast majority of food producers, processors, distributors, and vendors are privately owned & is highly diverse based on geography, climate, geology, history, economics, and logistics.
What are some of the risks that face the food sector? (2)
- Geography + Economics are key in food processing
- Transportation (trucking, railway, shipping are key to food CI)
What are some concerns for the Food sector? (2)
- Disease and food contamination
- Issues related to production, storage, transportation, distribution
What are the characteristics and components of the Water and Waste Water Sector?
Effective water & wastewater management is essential to human consumption, key to agriculture, removal/disposal of human waste, manufacturing processes, hydroelectric generation, cooling nuclear reactors, and recreation. Any failures would immediately affect all sector operations.
What are some of the risks that face the Water and Waster Water Sector? (2)
- Predicted to be in shorter supply by 2025 as the projected global population increases
- Vulnerable to terrorist attack
What are the characteristics and components of the Transportation Sector?
The transportation sector is a large, multifaceted interdependent mix of links, nodes, flows, processes agreements, rules, relationships & regulations. As a lifeline between communities & essential services it is critical to both the economy and national security.
What are some of the risks that face the Transportation Sector? (2)
- System complexity has a direct impact on the risk profile of all three hazard types
- No single entity has overall jurisdictional responsibility in the event of incidents or attacks
What are the characteristics and components of the Safety Sector?
The safety sector involves a selection of First Responder services and loosely related hazardous environments.
What are some of the risks that face the Safety Sector? (2)
- Climate change, extreme weather, terrorism & malicious actors are persistent risks
- Cyber vulnerabilities continue to increase as reliance on networked systems continues to rise in an effort to increase efficiency & cost-effectiveness.
What are the characteristics and components of the Government Sector?
Includes Federal, Provincial, and Municipal services that provide public goods (judicial system, inspections, emergency response, policing, counter-terrorism, financial compliance, consumer protection, environmental protection, postal system, and national defence.)
What are some of the risks that face the Government Sector? (6)
- Reliance of this CI on ICT and internet leaves it susceptible to cyber threats
- Challenges to Gov’t control by extremism
- Degradation of institutional trust (nationally and internationally) & partisanship
- Regionalism vs. multilateralism (esp. maintenance of traditional alliances)
- Climate change
- Lack of economic growth & stability across demographic & ethnic groups
What are the characteristics and components of the Manufacturing Sector? (2)
- Total value of the sector inputs consumed by Manufacturing from other CI sectors is $2.5 billion - the second smallest gross consumer of CI goods and services among the CI sectors
- Total value of sector outputs required by other CI sectors is $2.5 billion - the second smallest gross supplier to other CI sectors.
What are some of the risks and challenges that face the Manufacturing Sector? (4)
- Only specific manufacturing sub-sectors are considered part of this CI
- Intellectual property and patents are key to ensure viability
- Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) and internet of systems
- Industry 4.0 (smart machines with everything interconnected and sharing)
What are some of the characteristics and components of the Information and Communications Technology Sector?
There are just under 40,000 companies in the Canadian Information & Communications Technologies (ICT) sector. The large majority (over 35,000) fall within the software and computer services industries.
What are some of the risks that face the Information and Communications Technology Sector?
Vulnerability of the Internet communications pose a significant risk to the CI & supported operations. Increased connectivity of insecure remote cyber connections, and widespread availability of technical information has escalated the risks and incidence of attacks.
