The cyber defense of critical infrastructure is a national security imperative. The articles in this special issue of The Cyber Defense Review focus on cyber resilience and examine its role in enabling global power projection. Adversaries actively target, and have successfully infiltrated, the information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems that underpin all sectors of critical infrastructure. In the United States, Presidential Policy Directive 21, issued in 2013, emphasized the importance of resilience—the ability of critical systems to recover quickly from threats ranging from cyberattacks to natural disasters. It identified sixteen sectors whose assets are considered so vital that their incapacitation would have "a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety." The directive's core tenets still underscore modern approaches to building resilience: unity of effort across levels of government and between sectors, risk-based management of vulnerabilities, and effective cross-border information sharing.
Critical infrastructure is a fundamental necessity for sustaining human health and safety; defending it against adversaries who play by different rules requires "whole of society" strategies and carefully engineered defenses that draw from multiple disciplines...
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