Sweet Dreams and Rude Awakening - Critical Infrastructure´s Focal IT-Related Incidents

The proliferation of information technology has caused new challenging features for society. Modern information systems communicate with each other and create larger nets of systems. The focal systems in our society that maintain the core functions of a normal life must be reliable and robust. However, even these systems fail. Extensive studies about IT systems´ dependability usually concentrate either on technical or on human-related issues. With this study we wanted to give a wide-ranging and general prospect of IT-related problems in our society. We collected data from information system failures in society´s infrastructure, and generated an overview of problems in our core systems. The outcome of our survey was the fact that most failures with IT are not hostile attacks or system internal problems, but rather problems in surroundings with socio-economic and technical issues in complex system-of-systems development, like a lack of large-scale, holistic risk analysis and collaboration.