Securing Critical Infrastructure In An Era Of Expanded Attack Surfaces

As every organization gets populated with more users, more endpoints and more environments, it becomes harder and harder to maintain a holistic cybersecurity strategy. It becomes even harder when you are constantly bombarded by different types of cyberattacks — a scenario that gets more difficult if you decide to work for a critical infrastructure organization in the future. Take, for example, a recent report by Check Point that says organizations in India faced an average of 3,195 cyber incidents per week in 2025. When you narrow it down to critical infrastructure industries, in this case education, the figure balloons to 7,684 attacks per week.

The trend has continued in 2026, with several high-profile critical infrastructure entities being breached:

• Bank of Baroda (July 2026) confirmed an account compromise, with certain data accessed and the scope still under review.
• Tata Electronics (June 2026) confirmed a cybersecurity incident, saying its operations were unaffected.
• A third-party contractor breach connected to the Kudankulam Nuclear Plant (July 2026) exposed sensitive project files.

Should you decide to work in the cybersecurity division of a critical infrastructure organization in the future, the implications are huge. For any normal organization, being struck by a successful cyberattack leads to financial and reputational damage. However, if a critical infrastructure organization gets hit, the livelihood of Indian citizens could be adversely affected. Lives could even be lost.

Seeing this heightened importance, CISA's campaign for Cybersecurity Awareness Month is 'Securing The Next 250' — taking America's 250th birthday as a basis for securing its critical infrastructure for the next 250 years. Many of the learnings from the campaign will hold you in good stead as you make your way into the world of cybersecurity.

As we see it, the campaign prescribes 3 tiers to truly securing a critical infrastructure organization.

Tier 1: Mastering The Basics

Cybersecurity often involves advanced tactics & techniques to ward off attackers — yet sometimes, cyberattacks happen simply because we forget about the basics. Just incorporating these 4 essentials will help make your future organization a lot safer.

The Four Essentials

Make all your stakeholders use strong, unique 16 character-minimum passwords that can be managed with a password manager.	Use MFA to secure all your accounts, preferably phishing-resistant modes of authentication like FIDO2 passkeys.
Use a patch manager to keep constantly updating your business software.	Instead of ignoring phishing attempts, get all your enterprise stakeholders to recognize & report them.

The National Cybersecurity Alliance's campaign for the month covers these points in greater detail — something we also cover in our blog here.

Tier 2: Setting Up Safeguards

Once these basics have been instilled, it's time to layer some safeguards on top of that to ensure that security is maintained while your stakeholders are going about doing their daily tasks. CISA's campaign prescribes three safeguards that can help you massively when it comes to maintaining a strong cybersecurity posture:

Encryption	Continuous Monitoring	Backup & Recovery
All the communications being conducted between all the stakeholders in your future organization — whether it's emails, chats or file sharing — must be encrypted to strengthen your defences against attacks.	Use mechanisms that enable you to continuously monitor all work activities taking place in your organization. Additionally, set up guardrails so that anomalies are immediately detected in the case of an impending cyberattack.	Should a cyberattack be successful, your operations can't stop — too much is at stake if you work for a critical infrastructure organization. When you backup critical information, recovery is faster & less stressful.

Tier 3: Have A Response Plan

When you're getting attacked, every second counts for a critical infrastructure organization. Lives and livelihoods could be at risk, after all. Therefore, a watertight incident response plan is critical in helping you tackle all these threats in an efficient manner.

Here are all the stages to effectively responding & recovering from cyberthreats:

Detection	Alerting	Response	Recovery
Most threats linger in systems for weeks or months before you realize they're there. The first thing to do is set up detection tools in conjunction with your continuous monitoring processes so that you can identify threats soon after they enter your systems.	Of course, a lot of the alerts that come into SOC dashboards end up being false positives, and dealing with that could waste a lot of your time. AI is helpful in filtering out the noise and delivering relevant alerts for you to act on.	Once you realize that a particular alert presents a clear danger, it is time to respond. Pre-determined response playbooks being carried out by AI systems could drastically cut the time it takes for you to isolate and respond to the threat at hand.	Finally, once the threat has been dealt with, it is important to learn from what has happened and ensure that it doesn't happen again in the future. Forensic investigations are critical to understanding these learnings and incorporating them to tackle future threats.

One thing to note — with the new DPDP requirements being set in place soon, you will have a 6-hour response window to inform the relevant authorities if a cyber incident has indeed taken place in your organization. Time is very much of the essence, after all.

Keeping this in mind, you need to be up for the job — both in terms of skills and the responsibilities you will have when it comes to keeping our citizens safe. eSecurityIN courses are structured in a way where we combine latest tactics & techniques with a conscientious focus on the importance of the career you're about to embark upon.

What you're about to do is important, even essential, work for our country. We at eSecurityIN are there to help you — click here to check out our entire course list.