A multi-disciplined risk management process for distributed telecommunications networks: doing more with less on the frontier of a global village

Over five years ago (1991), the National Research Council in their report entitled: The Growing Vulnerability of the Public Switched Network, predicted that “were all private and public networks to be fully interconnected and employ common software, the entire network could be at risk if a hostile user were to find an exploitable flaw in system software”. Recent events have demonstrated that many networks today share common software, are increasingly interconnected and contain exploitable flaws, placing information infrastructure and connected local area networks and Intranets at risk