ABSTRACT

To understand the mechanisms to be applied to safeguard the nation and its computers and networks, we need to understand the types of threats. In [1] we described real-time threats as well as non-real-time threats. A real-time threat is a

threat that must be acted upon within a certain time to prevent some catastrophic situation. Note that a non-real-time threat could become a real-time threat over time. For example, one could suspect that a group of terrorists will eventually perform some act of terrorism. However, when we set time bounds, such as a threat will likely occur say before July 1, 2004, then it becomes a real-time threat and we have to take action immediately. If the time bounds are tighter, such as a two-day time frame, then we cannot afford to make any mistakes in our response.