2024 Critical Infrastructure Protection & Resilience North America outline topics of discussion will include:
Plenary Session Topics
CI Interdependencies and Cascading Effects in Community Situational Awareness
It is the interoperability between independent critical national infrastructures that is the catalyst for multiple failures in the so called cascade effect. As more infrastructure becomes increasingly interdependent, how do we identify the weaknesses to enhance resilience across industries to prevent and/or mitigate the effects of a natural disaster or man-made attack? How should the CI community build situational awareness to mitigate the cascading effect across infrastructures.
Collaboration, Information Sharing and Enhancing PPPs
It is well established that information sharing and collaboration is essential for developing effective risk, resilience ane emergency management planning. Information and Knowledge is key to make the right decisions to better plan to protect your assets. How do we break down the barriers to information sharing? How do we continue to build trust between government, operator/owners and the communities to enhance the PPPs impact on CI protection and resilience?
Emerging Threats against CI
The ever changing nature of threats, whether natural, through climate change, or man-made through terrorism activities and insider threats, and coupled together with the latest challenges with cyber attacks from many directions, creates the need to continually review and update policies, practices and technologies to meet these growing demands. But what are those emerging threats, both physical and cyber, and how can we identify, monitor and manage their levels of potential damage?
Cybersecurity Regulations, Best Practice and Minimum Standards
As the threat of cyber-attacks by state actors grows ever higher and attacks by criminals and malicious rogue players continues unabated the need to put in place robust legislation and standards and best practice becomes all the more urgent. What is the latest on the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act and developing regulations around AI in cybersecurity?
Modeling and Methodology Around Incident Mitigation & Emergency Management
Predicting how threats can impact business continuity of critical assets can be of major benefit for planning resiliency or emergency response. This affects both financial and resource planning. So what are the latest roles and assessments in modeling and methodology? What role can machine learning and AI play in building more accurate predictions and what measures can be put in place to mitigate risk?
Strategic Resilience Planning
Being prepared for the changing threat environment can benefit greatly in mitigating its impact on infrastructure and the broader community, ensuring resilience, safety and security. How to we develop and plan the best resilience strategies within our CI community? Through discpline in information sharing and making infrastructure preparedness personal, we can help to build resilience into our infrastructures that benefit the whole community.
Insider Threat
An insider threat is a perceived danger to your company that originates from individuals who work there, such as current or former employees, contractors, or business partners, who have inside knowledge of the company’s security procedures, data, and computer systems. The main objectives of malevolent insider threats are espionage, fraud, intellectual property theft, and sabotage, for monetary, private, or malicious purposes, they wilfully misuse their priviledged access to steal information or damage systems. Here we take a deeper dive into the range of threats and how to mitigate and counter these.
Technologies to Detect and Protect
What are some of the latest and future technologies, from ground surveillance, space based or cyber technology, to predict or detect the wide range of potential threats to CNI.
Mini Symposiums
Power & Energy Sector (Grid Resilience) Symposium
The energy sector has become the most critical of sectors. Without power, driven by oil, gas and renewable energies, all other CI stops. Recent cyber attacks on the energy sector, as well as natural hazards, from hurricanes in the Gulf to fires in California, gives much room for thought on how we best protect our most vital assets, including IT/OT and SCADA systems. How can we mitigate the impact of an attack or outage on the wider community and society, and build greater grid resilience?
Transport Sector Symposium
The movement of goods and people is vital to a local and national thriving economy. Without a safe, secure and resilient transport network, an economy will crumble. The transport network, from rail, road, air and sea, is at threat from cyber attacks, terrorist threats and natural hazards and its protection and resilience is key for communities and countries to maintain their economies.
Communications Sector Symposium
Communications is key to any community and its infrastructure assets has become increasingly threatened. Without communications, business will be lost, and any emergency coordination would be a disaster. The internet has become a vital part of communications for all. Protection of communication assets and their resilience is vital for businesses, government and all sectors of CI.
Pipelines Sector Symposium
Pipelines and associated land-based infrastructure along the chain are vulnerable to technical or human failures, natural disasters, cyber-attacks, terrorist threats and other emerging risks, as well as from geopolitical disputes. Disruptions along single transport routes can threaten the uninterrupted supply across the broader network. Protecting oil and gas assets and improving resilience while meeting operational and regulatory requirements is of high priority worldwide, particularly in times of heightened tension.
Critical Industries Sector Symposium
Critical Industries security practices are frequently integrated across industry (especially with increasingly converging physical and cyber technologies), they can be organized into four major categories: physical, cyber, personnel, and supply chain. Combining manufacturing, or other key processes, with the need for resilient logistical operations, in order to ensure reliable and timely delivery is key to any thriving economy.
Information Technology (CIIP) / Cybersecurity Symposium
Securing the digital infrastructure. Information technology is responsible for such a large portion of our workforce, business operations and access to information and data, Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) through cybersecurity and network security, is vital to protect information assets. Recent ransomware attacks and other threats, such as Malware, Stuxnet, etc and the continued cyber threats and intrusions, means we have to be more vigilant to protect our information assets. How do we better secure our data, can AI or DevSecOps play a role in CI cyber protection and threat detection?