Critical infrastructure sectors include energy production and transmission, water and wastewater, healthcare, and food and agriculture. In many countries, critical infrastructure is state-owned, while in others, like the U.S., private industry owns and operates a much larger portion of it.
Not only are each of these sectors critical to the appropriate functioning of modern societies, but they are also interdependent, and a cyberattack on one can have a direct impact on others. Attackers are increasingly choosing to deploy attacks on cyber-physical systems (CPS).
The risks were very real even before Russia invaded Ukraine. Attacks on organizations in critical infrastructure sectors rose from less than 10 in 2013 to almost 400 in 2020, a 3,900% increase. It’s not surprising, then, that governments worldwide are mandating more security controls for mission-critical CPS.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine increases the threat of cyberattacks for all organizations. You need to develop a holistic, coordinated CPS security strategy while also incorporating into governance emerging security directives for critical infrastructure. The U.S. “National Security Memorandum on Improving Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure Control Systems,” for example, is prioritizing the electricity and natural gas pipeline sectors, followed by the water/wastewater and chemical sectors.
The crux of the problem is that traditional network-centric, point-solution security tools are no longer sufficient to combat the speed and complexity of today’s cyberattacks. This is particularly the case as operational technology (OT), which connects, monitors and secures industrial operations (machines), continues to converge with the technology backbone that processes organization’s information technology (IT).
Conduct a complete inventory of OT/Internet of Things (IoT) security solutions in use within your organization. Also perform an evaluation of standalone or multifunction platform-based security options to further accelerate CPS security stack convergence.