Understanding Danger to Critical Telecom Infrastructure: A Risky Business

Malicious acts aimed directly against humans, or indirectly at their critical infrastructures is a real and present danger. However, how does society quantify danger levels? And is danger different from risk? Classic risk assessments require probability assessments, a highly speculative task for rare events. A ldquodanger indexrdquo, proposed by Randall Larsen in a recent book, is investigated here. In this exploratory research paper, this metric is examined in the context of current views of risk, and investigates its potential application to telecommunication settings. The danger index is deemed to have potential for assessing critical telecommunication infrastructure protection, avoiding difficult, and often impractical, probability assessments.