This document presents an overview of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection. "The President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP) was created by Executive Order 13010, signed by the President on July 15, 1996. The Executive Order originally stated that the Commission would terminate after one year; however, the order has since been amended to extend the life of the Commission by three months, to October 13, 1997. The Commission is therefore well along in its fifteen-month task of assessing physical and cyber threats to our vital infrastructures and developing policies and strategies to protect them. This overview briefing reports on the status of our work to those elements of the public and private sectors that have an interest in infrastructure assurance issues. We invite your participation as our work continues. Infrastructure protection is a broad subject of great complexity. At the outset we devised an approach to the task, and as work has progressed we have begun to form some general, preliminary impressions. Our outreach program has been extensive, but there are many knowledgeable sources we have not yet explored, and others yet to be discovered. We are by no means certain of our final findings and recommendations. What follows is intended to provide a sense of some of the issues we are exploring in the quest to find workable solutions to a serious problem."