Abstract: Last year Ukraine suffered a prolonged blackout of its power system induced by cyber attacks. The same repeated last month as well. Turkey’s banking network was under attack last year slowing down all banking transactions for two consecutive days leading to major economic loss. Kaspersky’s 2016 predictions on cyber thread situation in January 2016 included warning for interference through cyber attacks into their presidential election process and all signs indicate that it happened. Kaspersky’s 2017 prediction has ominous warnings for possible compromise of 2017 European electoral processes. An analysis of 2012 July blackout shows that even though it was not a cyber attack induced massive blackout but one can conceive of a similar situation by cyber attack through systematic encroachment of advanced persistent threats into various PMUs, digital relays, and other IEDs.

In this talk we will talk briefly about the threat landscape for our national critical infrastructure, and outline some directions that we should consider following to enhance the cyber protection and resilience of our critical infrastructure.