National infrastructure needs a new approach to cyber resilience
The prospect of bringing more of Britain’s critical national infrastructure into public ownership has prompted plenty of debate about investment, governance and accountability.
Far less attention has been paid to what it could mean for cybersecurity.
Regardless of where you stand politically, one thing is clear. Public ownership does not make cyber risk disappear.
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If anything, it raises expectations that essential services will be more resilient, more coordinated and better prepared to withstand disruption.
Head of Public Sector, EMEA, Filigran.
That expectation reflects the reality of the threat landscape. Energy providers, water companies, transport operators and healthcare organizations all sit at the center of complex digital ecosystems. Their ability to deliver essential services depends on thousands of suppliers, technology vendors and third parties.
When one organization is compromised, the effects can spread well beyond its own network. Resilience therefore depends on far more than protecting individual organizations. It depends on understanding and managing the relationships between them.
If the government is serious about strengthening national infrastructure, cybersecurity must become part of that conversation from day one. That means moving beyond isolated security programs and towards a model where organizations share intelligence, understand common risks and coordinate their response before disruption spreads.
Critical infrastructure extends beyond organizational boundaries
Some of the defining cyber attacks of recent years have demonstrated that attackers are rarely interested in a single target. They look for opportunities to compromise one organization in order to reach many others.
The SolarWinds attack remains one of the clearest examples. By compromising trusted software updates, attackers gained access to thousands of organizations around the world. More recently, the ransomware attack on Synnovis disrupted pathology services across several NHS trusts, leading to cancelled operations, delayed appointments and widespread disruption to patient care.
Neither incident remained confined to the organization that was initially compromised. Both exposed the reality that critical infrastructure now depends on interconnected supply chains as much as physical assets.
That presents a challenge for every operator of critical national infrastructure. Security can no longer be viewed solely through the lens of protecting your own estate. Organizations also need visibility into the threats affecting suppliers, partners and the wider ecosystem. A vulnerability within a software provider or outsourced service can quickly become a problem for every organization that depends on it.
This is where many existing security programs begin to show their limitations. Organizations have invested heavily in detection technologies, vulnerability management platforms and threat intelligence feeds. They are collecting more information than ever before. Yet many still struggle to translate that information into confident operational decisions.
Better decisions start with better intelligence
The cybersecurity industry has spent years focusing on visibility. The assumption has been that if organizations can discover every vulnerability, identify every asset and collect every threat feed, they will naturally become more secure.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
Filigran’s recent State of Threat Management report found that organizations consume an average of fourteen different threat intelligence feeds, yet fewer than half have fully operationalized that intelligence across their security programs.
At the same time, 84% of respondents said the attacks they experience exploit risks that were already known but had not been prioritized. Almost every organization surveyed also reported difficulty determining whether identified exposures were genuinely exploitable.
Those findings illustrate a wider industry problem. The challenge is no longer discovering risk. It is deciding which risks deserve immediate attention.
Security teams are surrounded by alerts, vulnerability reports and intelligence updates. Every tool claims to identify another critical issue demanding urgent action. Without context, everything starts to look important. Analysts spend valuable time investigating vulnerabilities that may never be exploited while genuinely dangerous attack paths remain hidden among the noise.
That has consequences beyond operational efficiency. Every hour spent investigating a low priority issue is an hour that cannot be spent reducing real business risk. Organizations are not simply overwhelmed by the volume of information. They are overwhelmed by the number of decisions they are expected to make every day.
Threat intelligence should shape decisions long before an incident
One reason this happens is that threat intelligence is still too often treated as a function of the Security Operations Centre. Intelligence is gathered, analyzed and used to help detect or investigate malicious activity once attackers have already reached the network.
Yet, threat intelligence has far greater value when it informs decisions much earlier in the security lifecycle.
Used effectively, it should help organizations understand which vulnerabilities are actively being targeted, which attack paths present the greatest business risk and which remediation activities will deliver the greatest reduction in exposure. Rather than treating every vulnerability as equally urgent, security teams can focus on the threats that genuinely matter to their environment.
This is also where Continuous Threat Exposure Management, or CTEM, has an important role to play. CTEM should not be viewed as another technology category or another security acronym. It provides a structured framework for connecting threat intelligence, exposure management, validation and remediation into a continuous process. Instead of relying on assumptions or theoretical risk scores, organizations can validate whether a vulnerability is genuinely exploitable before committing time and resources to fixing it.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle is not technical at all. Many organizations still operate with threat intelligence, vulnerability management, penetration testing and governance teams working independently, each with different priorities, processes and tooling. Breaking down those silos often delivers greater improvements than introducing another security platform.
Building a national capability
If critical infrastructure is expected to become more resilient, collaboration has to become part of everyday operations rather than something that only happens during a major incident. That thinking is already beginning to take shape.
Earlier this month, the National Cyber Security Centre and GCHQ issued a call for industry, academia and critical infrastructure operators to help define Cyber Shield, a proposed national cyber defense capability designed to combine AI, shared intelligence and coordinated defense at national scale.
Significantly, the initiative recognizes that the government cannot build this capability alone. It will depend on close collaboration with the organizations responsible for protecting the UK’s essential services.
Additionally, the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill provides an opportunity to strengthen that approach by encouraging greater consistency across essential sectors. Frameworks such as the National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Assessment Framework already give organizations a common language for measuring resilience.
They become even more valuable when they encourage organizations to learn from one another instead of tackling similar challenges in isolation.
Open standards have an important role to play as well. The Dutch National Cyber Security Centre recently made STIX and TAXII 2.1 the mandatory standard for sharing cyber threat intelligence across government.
While technical on the surface, the decision reflects a broader principle. When organizations exchange intelligence using common standards, they remove friction from collaboration and can respond to threats more quickly.
Technology alone will not deliver that outcome. Artificial intelligence, automation and modern security platforms can help organizations process more information and reduce manual effort, but they still depend on good intelligence, sound governance and trusted relationships.
For the simple reason that fast decisions only become good decisions when they are supported by the right context.
Resilience is a shared responsibility
Whether more of Britain’s critical national infrastructure ultimately moves into public ownership is only part of the story. Cyber attackers do not distinguish between public and private organizations. They target weak links, trusted suppliers and interconnected systems wherever they find them.
The organizations that will be best prepared for the years ahead will be those that treat resilience as a collective responsibility. They will operationalize threat intelligence before incidents occur, validate real-world risk rather than relying on assumptions, and collaborate across organizational boundaries as readily as attackers do.
Protecting critical infrastructure has never been solely about defending individual organizations. It is about strengthening the entire ecosystem that keeps essential services running. If the UK wants to build genuinely resilient national infrastructure, that is where the conversation needs to begin.
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The prospect of bringing more of Britain’s critical national infrastructure into public ownership has prompted plenty of debate about investment, governance and accountability. Far less attention has been paid to what it could mean for cybersecurity. Regardless of where you stand politically, one thing is clear. Public ownership does not…
