Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Date
2016
Abstract
Critical infrastructures are vital assets for the public safety, economic welfare and national security of countries. Cyber systems are used extensively to monitor and control critical infrastructures. A number of infrastructures are connected to the Internet via corporate networks. Cyber security is, therefore, an important item of the national security agenda of a country. The intense interest in cyber security has initiated research focusing on national cyber security maturity assessments. However, little, if any, research is dedicated to maturity assessments of national critical infrastructure protection efforts. Instead, the vast majority of studies merely examine diverse national-level security best practices ranging from cyber crime response to privacy protection.
This paper proposes a maturity model for measuring the readiness levels of national critical infrastructure protection efforts. The development of the model involves two steps. The first step analyzes data pertaining to national cyber security projects using grounded theory to extract the root causes of the susceptibility of critical infrastructures to cyber threats. The second step determines the maturity criteria by introducing the root causes to subject-matter experts polled in a Delphi survey. The resulting survey-based maturity model is applied to assess the critical infrastructure protection efforts in Turkey. The results are realistic and intuitively appealing, demonstrating that the maturity model is useful for evaluating the national critical infrastructure protection preparedness of developing countries such as Turkey.
College/Unit
College of Arts, Sciences and Technology
Publication or Event Title
International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection
Volume
15
First Page
47
Last Page
59
DOI
10.1016/j.ijcip.2016.10.001
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Karabacak, B., Ozkan Yildirim, S., & Baykal, N. (2016). A vulnerability-driven cyber security maturity model for measuring national critical infrastructure protection preparedness. International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, 15, 47-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcip.2016.10.001