Plant Security - Public Awareness and Mitigation of Third Party Attacks as a new Layer of Protection in the Safety Concept

Technical Safety has been improved to a significant extent during the last thirty years. This holds for chemical and petrochemical plants as well as for oil and gas pipelines - international and national statistics show a decrease in the number of events. Nevertheless, catastrophic incidents can't be fully excluded in future. Third party activities like cybercrime attacks on operational technology, excavation and drilling into pipelines, or accidents during maintenance and service are main reasons for these incidents. With today's State of Safety Technology, a wider protection of the infrastructure would lead to a non-acceptable effort. However, especially in Germany population density increases while public acceptance of incidents decreases continuously.In the presentation, several new measures to mitigate third party attacks and incidents are proposed to define a new barrier in the Layer of Protection Concept for plants and pipelines and to integrate security as part of the overall safety concept.