Anticipating Future Vulnerability: Defining Characteristics of Increasingly Critical Infrastructure‐like Systems

The world's ‘Critical Infrastructure’ (CI) has increased in size during the three decades between 1975–2006. CIs are those systems that provide critical support services to a country, geographic area for a corporate entity; when they fail, there is potentially a large cost in human life, the environment or economic markets. This article examines the characteristics of new technologies or services that are becoming a part of the CI, but are not yet. The article attempts to systematically define the characteristics of ‘criticality’ in order to better anticipate the types of vulnerabilities these new technologies or services create.