Ethical/Societal Dimension topic 1: Improving protection of Critical infrastructures from insider threats

Topic description

Scope:

Specific Challenge:

Critical Infrastructures are crucial assets for the functioning of a society and an economy. Consequently, they can be the target of several threats, in particular terrorist threats.

In this framework, the risk of an insider threat coming from personnel and third party individuals, who have inside knowledge about the infrastructure security practices and/or have access rights to certain key components, data and computer, is particularly high for Critical Infrastructures.

An insider threat particularly difficult to be timely identified is the one brought along by personnel who have undergone a violent radicalisation process and, as a consequence of that, intend to affect the normal functioning of the infrastructure or, even, to sabotage it.

In order to prevent the latter, it is important to deepen the current knowledge about the main constituents of the violent radicalisation processes to timely detect them and to prevent resulting insider threats to materialize.

Scope:

Proposals in this area should specifically aim at strengthening the focus on determining and analysing the main constituent factors of a violent radicalisation process (including family and social environment, psychological factors, religion and ideology, the internet and social media, socio-economic and political factors) as well as on the conditions that can lead a person from ideas to violent action. The proposed actions should take into consideration past and on-going EU research in this field and include, to the extent possible, real life examples of individuals that underwent a violent radicalisation process.

The feasibility of the development and of the application of new equipment and systems to support the security practitioners should also be considered by the proposal.

The proposal and the usable results should take into account fundamental rights protection, comparative studies of international laws, ethical and societal impacts, with particular consideration for EU anti-terrorism and Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) policies.

Proposals addressing this topic may involve the use of classified background information (EU or national) or the production of security sensitive results. As such, certain project deliverables may require security classification. The final decision on the classification of projects is subject to the security evaluation.

Expected impact:

The output of this proposal should be directly applicable to support national and local security practitioners to strengthen the protection of national and European Critical Infrastructures from the insider threats brought by violent radicals.

In particular, the results of the proposed action are expected to contribute to an early detection of violent radicals by shedding light on the violent radicalisation processes and paths and, overall, by raising the awareness of the security practitioners about the possible early indicators that can allow a timely detection of insider threats brought to critical infrastructures by violent radicalised individuals.

The action is expected to proactively target the needs and requirements of users, such as national and local law enforcement agencies.

Type of action: Coordination and Support Actions

Socio-economic science and humanities