For two years, a team of researchers, including experts from the Institute for Technology Assessment (ITA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), investigated what would happen in Austria in the event of a total internet outage. Which critical infrastructures could remain operational, and for how long? Jaro Krieger-Lamina, former security expert at the ITA and member of the project team, has summarised the key findings of the project in the latest ITA dossier, ‘What works without the internet?’
The project ‘ISIDOR – Consequences of a long-term and widespread restriction of Internet-based services and infrastructures’ aimed to investigate the dependencies and cascade effects that would occur in the event of an incident: What happens when all emergency plans are put into effect? Would there be supply bottlenecks, and if so, when would they start? The project also looked at how government crisis and disaster management can prepare for such a situation.
‘The supply of drinking water and the disposal of wastewater will probably continue to function. Major difficulties are to be expected, for example, where IT processes and resources are outsourced in normal operations, such as when using cloud services,’ says Krieger-Lamina. All the key findings of the project, which was funded by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (BMLUK) from 2020 to 2022 as part of the KIRAS security research funding programme, can be found in the ITA dossier.