Three Steps Government Policymakers Can Take to Reduce Critical Infrastructure Cyber Attacks

Begin with tightening entry controls and fortifying firewalls to curb unauthorized access. This move raises protection status across the organization, blocks bypass paths, and minimizes exposure for payments ecosystems and core utilities.

Key actions include enforcing least-privilege access for employees, applying timely patches, and deploying containment kits to isolate affected files. Build clear plans, collect and label incidents, and align with canadians partners when sharing risk data and response actions.

Crossfire readiness: Simulate incidents to reveal how entry points and high-value assets are defended, focusing on protecting key servers that enable payments and protection of files across networks. Use real-data from collected logs to refine controls.

What regulators can influence is the speed of plan adoption, the status of data-sharing coordination, and the way organizations mitigate compromises. Emphasize continuous improvements: update procedures, share best practices with canadians, and monitor status dashboards for ongoing exposure.

Begin immediately by collecting baseline metrics on access attempts, failed logins, and file transfers; then implement a rollout that patches gaps, trains employees, and updates protection kits to close holes before exploitation.

Practical Framework for Reducing Critical Infrastructure Cyber Attacks

Recommendation: Establish a risk mitigation program with explicit ownership across lifeline networks and measurable outcomes. By june, implement a prioritized plan that spans entire agencies, with language-specific playbooks and a shared threat view to speed response across region and languages, including canadas operations and russian-speaking teams. Doing so will require party involvement and clear terms; names and responsibilities must be documented. This makes the approach tangible and ready for action.

• Governance and ownership
  • Assign a responsible officer for each asset class; name roles clearly on the org chart; ensure all agencies participate.
  • Set a priority list focused on serious cases and growing threats; align with canadas authorities and regional partners.
  • Draft terms of reference that standardize response language and procedures; ensure writing and translation across languages for broad accessibility; ensure all parties appear in progress reviews.
  • Must align policies across agencies; establish a single accountable party for cross-boundary actions and interagency coordination.
• Asset visibility and hardening
  • Conduct entire asset discovery across IT, OT, and operational systems; map intrusion kill chains; label assets with a consistent name scheme in multiple languages.
  • Implement segmentation and least-privilege access; enforce MFA, patch cadence, and baseline configurations to curb sabotage and bypass attempts.
  • Protect vessel and port systems with dedicated monitoring; maintain offline backups and regular restore tests to withstand disruption.
• Threat intelligence and supply chain
  • Establish a regional intel loop through response teams; ingest classified indicators where allowed; track rising raas activity and supply-chain risk; monitor dprk-linked actors.
  • Connect threat signals to the full intrusion chain; correlate indicators with observed activity in key transport and energy networks; adapt defenses accordingly.
  • Share lessons learned in region-wide forums; maintain a growing library of cases and mitigations; writing standards help ensure consistent understanding across languages.
• Detection, response, and exercises
  • Deploy multi-layer monitoring that detects anomalous behavior and bypass attempts; ensure response playbooks exist in multiple languages and writing styles for clarity.
  • Run regular tabletop exercises, including canadas-based participants and russian-speaking teams; practice with port authorities, vessel operators, and service providers; emphasize timely decision-making and cross-agency coordination.
  • Track metrics such as time-to-detect, time-to-contain, and time-to-recover; publish concise monthly summaries to leadership.
• Vendor risk and evolution
  • Assess third-party risk across procurement chains; require security controls in contracts; monitor raas marketplace activity and evolving supply chains; demand security artifacts from vendors (tests, patch histories).
  • Update controls as threat patterns evolve; review risk posture quarterly and adjust taking priority accordingly.

Note: The approach accounts for regional realities, including canadas operations and dprk-related signals; it relies on multilingual communications, clear language writing, and inclusive participation from vessel operators, energy providers, and regional agencies. It emphasizes establishing practical processes that mitigate breaches and minimize disruption when a compromise occurs.

Identify and Prioritize Critical Assets and Their Attack Surfaces

Recommendation: Build a living registry of assets across IT, OT, and cloud domains, with asset identifiers, owners, business impact scores, and interdependencies. Enable auto-discovery and weekly validation by the head of security and responsible individuals to deliver accurate information and reveal gaps in coverage.

Identify attack surfaces for each asset using a model that links exposure to external endpoints, remote management interfaces, cloud APIs, and third-party connections. Tag surfaces as limited or extensive, and use caas to monitor cloud access risk remotely; report trends in information security dashboards.

Prioritize by adversaries’ interests and probable access paths, mapping to a formal model and credible research. Score likelihood and impact, then concentrate resources on Tier 1 assets first, with later expansion to Tier 2 and Tier 3 as procedures mature.

Concrete action plan: implement network segmentation, enforce least-privilege access, deploy MFA, and maintain rigorous patch and configuration management. Establish standardized procedures for change control and remediation to shorten the cycle from discovery to secure state.

Measurement and governance: track progress with dashboards; compare results over weeks; run tabletop exercises and research-based drills to quantify manipulation attempts and the chance of breach. Align cadence with march timelines and update instructions for operators globally.

Insights and collaboration: leverage tools from microsoft and microsofts security stack to enhance detection and response. Deliver guidance to cross-functional teams to ensure all individuals understand their responsibilities, when to escalate, and how to adjust procedures. Represent the opinion of operators across regions to ensure perspectives are represented.

Mandate Baseline Security Controls and Patch Management for OT and ICS

Mandate a baseline set of security controls and centralized patch management for OT and ICS across utilities and allied sites, enforcing a 21-day window to deploy high-priority updates and a 45-day window for less urgent fixes, with automated testing in a sandbox and formal change-control approval before production rollout.

Establish a canonical baseline: automatic asset discovery and inventory with device criticality tagging; enforce multi-factor authentication for operator accounts; enforce least-privilege access; segment networks by function and isolate remote-access paths; standardize update channels and secure supply-chain communications; push logs to a centralized data lake for real-time assessments and trend analysis; and implement measures to mitigate vulnerabilities before exploitation.

Integrate countermeasures against social-engineering risks: deploy phishing-as-a-service detection, run continuous training, and conduct simulated campaigns; require confirmation for links in workflows, and ensure that incident response playbooks are practiced to shorten containment time; monitor manipulation and attacker behavior across sites, andor ensure cross-team collaboration.

Align with legal requirements and agency directives at federal and state levels; amass telemetry from utilities and agencies to feed mutual-aid efforts; publish called assessments that measure maturity against a common scale; address performance gaps rapidly and document remediation progress to support oversight.

Address endangering vulnerabilities in vendor software and/or third-party components by enforcing code-scan standards, SBOMs, trusted update channels, and signed patches; scale remediation across vendors and sites, ensuring identified issues are tracked with status, owners, and due dates.

Coordinate cross-nation practice and share best practices to grow resilience; differentiate between mature and nascent programs, and close the gap via targeted activities and joint trainings; cant rely on fragmented practices; create governance that lets agencies address legal and privacy constraints while enabling rapid remediation; leverage links between asset inventories and patch catalogs to address gaps.

Measure impact with concrete metrics: patch coverage by asset category, mean time to patch, percentage of devices with MFA, rate of successful phishing simulations, and dwell time after detection; costs must be allocated to program budgets, with periodic audits to assess compliance; maintain a public-facing dashboard with identified improvements and remediation outcomes, and address the difference between scale opportunities and real-world constraints.

Establish Real-Time Threat Intelligence Sharing and Coordinated Response

Implement a secure, real-time threat intelligence sharing fabric across sectors and healthcare networks, united by skilled researchers to detect intrusions and respond rapidly, leveraging shared products and assessments; this need is addressed by taking last-mile actions.

Establish a governance layer that defines who can post, access, and verify signals, enabling when events occur an automated flow of derived indicators and an attempt to curb exfiltrating activity; this work leverages nctas and other entities, and it considers generative analytics to enrich context.

Build a unified playbook for network and healthcare responders; when complex intrusions strike, responders trigger automated containment to prevent cascading disruptions; prohibiting lateral movement and ambiguous handoffs; the approach uses russian indicators and derived data to improve detection and the speed of actions, taking a coordinated stance to respond with precision.

Track last update times, run assessments, and publish performance metrics; this effort brings researchers and sector participants together to ensure the approach makes the network more resilient and mitigates disruptions across the system.

Define and Modernize Cybercrime Laws Linked to Infrastructure Attacks

Adopt a statutory framework that directly criminalizes interference with internet-connected critical services, with explicit elements of action, intent, and harm. Include offenses for unauthorized access, ransomware deployment, encryption, and data exfiltration that disrupt essential operations in healthcare and other vital sectors, and set scalable penalties aligned with the disruption’s severity.

Define scope, offenses, and liability where officials can apply consistently across jurisdictions, with near-term reporting obligations and cross-border cooperation. Use derived risk assessments to calibrate penalties, ensuring an elevated response to criminal networks that rely on anonymous online platforms and overseas affiliates, while maintaining proportional prosecutions.

Establish a taxonomy of offenses and defenses framed in accessible terms for corporate security leaders, healthcare providers, and utilities, guiding engineers and engineering teams working with their IT counterparts to secure operations. Provisions should cover intrusion, data theft, and ransomware, with guidance on how to handle investigations, preserve evidence from computers, and coordinate with law enforcement for rapid response.

Create a joint vessel for information sharing among officials and industry, with clear channels for healthcare, corporate entities, and public services to report incidents, share indicators of compromise, and coordinate response. Align incentives so interests of patients, customers, and the public are prioritized, while addressing perceived politics and ensuring transparent governance. Expand guidance on writing incident reports and training materials to reflect evolving technologies.

Institutionalize ongoing reviews to maintain a modern, adaptable framework that can respond to emerging technologies and criminal methodologies. The scope includes internet-connected devices, supply chain components, and automation across industrial ecosystems. Establish strategies for evaluation and revision, where officials assess performance, derive metrics, and adjust resources. Ensure the will to protect sensitive data and public safety, and secure operations across sectors.

Develop Clear Incident Response, Recovery, and Accountability Mechanisms

Recommendation: Implement a formal, tested incident response, recovery, and accountability mechanism that activates within minutes of detection, assigns clearly defined roles, and preserves evidence for investigations and audits.

Inventory every internet-connected asset and tag it with owner, criticality, and contact points to improve response speed. Deploy detection models that correlate alerts across networks, endpoints, and third‑party services, then automate triage to assign priority and victims to response teams. Ensure resources are allocated to containment, eradication, and recovery, with delivery of a concise message to management and operations teams that explains impact and next steps. Design scenarios for common sabotage attempts and scams targeting supply chains, and rehearse them in dry-runs to shorten recovery time. This yields much clearer information for the reader and helps mitigate ambiguity.

Accountability mechanisms require formal contracts and processes with partners to guarantee continued support and cooperation during incidents. Keep human-in-the-loop oversight for legal and ethical considerations, while leveraging automation for speed. After events, publish a factual timeline, quantify detection-to-containment times, and outline what went well and what needs improvement; use these details to refine resource allocations and delivery commitments to victims and stakeholders. Narratives that mislead the reader should be countered with transparent data and a clear message about remedies and responsibility. This is their right to understand what happened and how it was addressed. Political-relations considerations should be addressed to align stakeholder expectations and reinforce trust through accountable delivery.

Governance should embed accountability into daily delivery: specify who signs off on containment, what data is shared with the reader, and how progress is communicated. Use dashboards to show detection-to-containment times, recovery milestones, and lessons learned; align these with contracts and performance reviews. Detail the human aspects of response, from on-call rotations to training, and commonly used metrics such as training completion, tabletop exercise participation, and the effectiveness of message delivery to victims. These elements lead to stronger risk mitigation and a clearer narrative for stakeholders.