Critical Infrastructure Cascade: Cyberattack Propagation & Containment

Attack Parameters

Attack intensity 60%

Network segmentation 30%

Redundancy investment 25%

Sector Status

Live Readouts

Sectors compromised

0 / 6

Cascade depth (hops)

Elapsed (sim-hours)

0.0

Contained edges

0 / 0

How it works

This is a defensive model of how a cyberattack on one critical-infrastructure sector can cascade into others through shared operational dependencies (power feeds water pumps, water cools hospital equipment, telecom carries SCADA control traffic, and so on) — the same interdependency risk that national CERTs and ICS-CERT advisories analyse. It uses the independent cascade model from network science: at each discrete step, every newly-compromised node gets exactly one chance to "infect" each of its still-healthy neighbours.

P(i → j) = p₀ · I · w_ij · (1 − S) · (1 − 0.6·R_j)

p₀   base transmission probability per edge
I    attack intensity slider (0–1)
w_ij dependency weight of the edge i→j
S    network segmentation (0–1) — cuts every edge's chance
R_j  redundancy investment at node j — backup systems that
     absorb a compromised dependency without failing over

Segmentation (Zero-Trust microsegmentation, Purdue-model zone separation) multiplies down every edge uniformly — it is the defender's main lever to stop a compromise from crossing sector boundaries. Redundancy (backup power, failover water treatment, offline hospital protocols) makes an individual node resistant even when an upstream sector it depends on goes down. A node recovers to "contained" once its incident response completes, roughly proportional to redundancy.

Attack intensity — how aggressively the initial compromise attempts to spread (attacker skill/resourcing).
Segmentation — defender's network isolation between sectors; raises it to sever cascade paths in real time.
Redundancy — defender's investment in backup systems per sector; raises it to shorten containment time.
Launch Attack — starts the cascade from the Power Grid node with the current parameters; particles show live control-traffic flow along the dependency graph, red pulses show an active exploit attempt.

Operational Under attack Compromised Contained

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