Each nation's critical infrastructure faces threats from various quarters. These include nature (floods, quakes, tornadoes), people (hackers, thieves, terrorists, hostile nation-state attackers), and accidents involving biological, chemical, or nuclear substances.

In last decade, there has been an alarming increase in terrorism, hacking, and general criminal activities. In their evil acts, these criminals could target critical infrastructure in energy and utility sectors to derail communication and generally cause chaos. Others have used cyberattacks to shut down systems and deny services.

With all those glaring dangers, securing your nation's critical infrastructure becomes mandatory.

Hence, Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) is the process of securing the infrastructure of 'organizations' in critical industries. It ensures that the critical infrastructures of organizations in industries like agriculture, energy, food, and transportation receive protection against cyber threats, natural disasters, and terrorist threats.

In practical terms, CIP typically involves securing critical infrastructures such as SCADA systems and networks, as well as ICS and operational technology (OT).

The PDD-63 presidential directive (USA) in May 1998, identified 16 sectors that the U.S. government considered as critical to its national infrastructure. Each sector was then assigned a government agency and department responsible for putting together a CIP plan to protect it.

Here is the list of these 16 major sectors considered critical to national infrastructure:

1. Chemical

2. Commercial facilities

3. Communications

4. Critical manufacturing

5. Dams

6. Defense industrial base

7. Emergency services

8. Energy

9. Financial services

10. Food and agriculture

11. Government facilities

12. Healthcare and public health

13. Information technology

14. Nuclear reactors, materials, and waste

15. Transportation systems

16. Water and wastewater systems

17. Election system (latest addition to the list)

However, various countries have some variations to their list of such sectors.

You can check a listing of some countries here:

https://websites.fraunhofer.de/.../Critical...

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WHY IS CIP IMPORTANT?

Securing critical infrastructure is vital to ensuring that your country's people have access to services like drinking water, electricity, and food. It is also crucial to protecting high-value industries from cyberattacks, such as the chemical, communications, emergency services, healthcare, information technology, and transportation sectors.

If hackers could breach the critical infrastructure of the sectors listed above, the result could have devastating consequences for organizations. It could also pose a serious threat to global economies and communities. Therefore, successfully protecting critical infrastructures requires 'government agencies' to establish strong partnerships with commercial parties and use appropriate solutions to implement and manage these initiatives.

Protecting critical infrastructure is also reliant on recognizing the RISKS that could threaten their integrity. This includes attack vectors and network security, as well as issues like equipment failing, the risk of human error, and natural disasters such as weather activity. These risks must be factored into any decision around solutions that enable organizations to detect and identify security attacks and network behavior anomalies.

You need a national agency to ascertain and manage overall risk facing these sectors. It should address the biggest risks that your nation's critical infrastructure faces through analysis, planning, and collaboration. It should this by identifying and prioritizing the most significant risks that your critical infrastructure faces and taking actions that will mitigate the risks.

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How Do You Enhance The Security of Critical Infrastructure?

Improving general security overall, is fundamental to protecting critical infrastructure. This would include enhancing physical security, such as ensuring doors are locked and placing effective fences to protect buildings.

It also includes deploying effective cybersecurity solutions to protect organizations’ networks, systems, and users, as well as identifying and addressing their virtual vulnerabilities.

If your organization belongs to any one of above mentioned sectors, then you also must practice good cyber hygiene by preventing the use of weak passwords, patching vulnerabilities, and avoiding phishing scams and malware attacks.

However, you will face significant cybersecurity challenges. For example, your ICS (Industrial Control Systems) cannot be scanned for vulnerabilities in the same way as virtual IT environments because doing so can take the industrial system offline, which could bring down a plant’s operations.

Additionally, many OT (Operations Technology) systems have existed since before the internet and were in "air-gapped" systems that lowered their risk of cyberattacks in old times. But these systems are becoming more exposed to hackers’ exploits, because almost everything is so much connected...

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What is your role in Critical Infrastructure Protection?

It is almost the same as in normal enterprises.

Each major security vendor out there is offering solutions to organisations that belong to Critical Infrastructure sectors.

➤ Within all 16 critical infrastructure sectors, the confidentiality, integrity and availability of networks, systems and equipment are of the utmost importance.

➤ You need to understand fully that any unexpected 'downtime' is not only unacceptable, but it can be dangerous, destructive and costly.

➤ The same can be said for unauthorized access, as it can be very difficult to find an adversary’s footprint and root them out once they have bypassed security controls and entered into a system or network.

➤ ICS environments can also serve as a gateway into enterprise and government IT networks, which frequently maintain incredibly sensitive IP, company and customer data, as well as classified national security information.

➤ You would be doing all the things for information security and cybersecurity, such as deploying and managing the best possible NGFWs that safeguard organizations’ networks from known and evolving security threats.

➤ You would be implementing security solutions for SCADA systems and ICS, which remove critical systems’ exposure to the expanding threat landscape. You will designing the security of the complex infrastructure in an efficient, non-disruptive manner that ensures your OT environments are compliant and stay protected.

➤ All in all, you would ensure that multiple technologies to work together over IT and OT environments, rather than operate in silos.

The same set of technologies and the same set of skills are demanded for critical infrastructure. Everything that you have been learning in cybersecurity is implementable in these sectors directly. The only difference you may find is that overall organisational RISK is higher than normal companies. Things will be tighter in the context of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) than you would know otherwise.

Critical infrastructure needs to be resilient to changing conditions, as well as withstand -and recover from disruption. This means strength against physical and cyber threats, -which require a comprehensive cybersecurity defense program