What Is Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP)?

The 16 major sectors considered critical to national infrastructure were: 

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

These sectors have recently been joined by election systems, which were designated as critical infrastructure by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Securing critical infrastructure is vital to ensuring the American 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 the 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. 

Many of the critical infrastructure protection examples discussed above use the following enterprise technologies:

1. Deep CDR: Content disarm and reconstruction (CDR) disassembles a file into its constituent parts and eliminates any potential threats.
2. Proactive DLP: Data loss prevention technology (DLP) protects sensitive information via metadata removal, automatic document redaction, or watermark addition rather than blocking files.
3. Multiscanning: Multiscanning technology makes anti-malware solutions resilient and significantly enhances malware detection rates and outbreak detection times.
4. File-based vulnerability: This technology searches for flaws in files and applications before they are installed, so IT teams can fix any vulnerabilities.
5. Threat intelligence: To avoid malware outbreaks or stop them, threat intelligence analyzes malicious patterns, making it easier to identify threats.
6. Sandbox: Sandboxes run untested code and third-party software in an environment that has no access to the company's network. They can also be used to contain threats in a safe, insulated environment, enabling you to observe how they behave.
7. Endpoint compliance: This enables enterprises to identify, evaluate, and correct applications that do not adhere to established operational and security regulations.
8. Endpoint vulnerability assessment: This ensures that all programs are running with the most recent versions, strengthening endpoint security. Automatic patching can quickly fix vulnerabilities after they have been found.
9. Malware detection on endpoints: This evaluates an endpoint for any suspicious activity by checking the libraries and processes that are running.
10. Endpoint application removal: This enables the removal of security solutions, including antivirus software and firewalls, that are not appropriate or approved for the work environment. It can remove potentially unwanted applications (PUA) as well.

Fortinet enables organizations to protect their critical infrastructure with its OT security. This is a proactive approach, and the OT launch by Fortinet enables multiple technologies to work together over IT and OT environments, rather than operate in silos. Organizations get fast, automated responses to security attacks, full visibility of their infrastructure, the ability to plug OT security gaps, and simplified management. 

Fortinet also offers security solutions for SCADA systems and ICS, which remove critical systems’ exposure to the expanding threat landscape. Fortinet enables organizations to design the security of their complex infrastructure in an efficient, non-disruptive manner that ensures their OT environments are compliant and protected.

Furthermore, Fortinet provides next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) that safeguard organizations’ networks from known and evolving security threats. NGFWs filter network traffic to protect against internal and external threats. They also offer advanced content inspection that identifies cyberattacks and discovers and blocks malware.

Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) is the process of securing the infrastructure of organizations in critical industries. 

Securing critical infrastructure is vital to ensuring the American 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.