ABSTRACT
A major mission area of homeland security is protecting critical infrastructures and key assets. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7 (HSPD-7) identified seventeen critical infrastructure sectors. This chapter presents two cases. The first case, "Catastrophic Pandemic: Cases in Ethical Decision-Making," provides a worst-case scenario of a worldwide influenza pandemic based on planning documents prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The second case, "The Impact of Cyber-Security on Critical Infrastructure Protection: The Advanced Persistent Threat," highlights how important the cyber-infrastructure is to critical infrastructure protection across all sectors. The advanced persistent threat highlights a new type of malicious actor that routinely conducts attacks against the cyber-infrastructure using cyber-attack tools. Because of the interconnected nature of the cyber-infrastructure, these attacks can spread quickly and have debilitating effects, as highlighted in the examples in this case.
