Critical Infrastructure Security Month

During November the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and National Protective Security Authority (NPSA) are marking Critical Infrastructure Security Month (CISM) with our international partners in the Critical 5: the United States of America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

CISM is an opportunity to take stock and highlight the work we do to protect the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI). As National Technical Authorities, we are responsible for providing advice to industry on physical, personnel and cyber security. As the threats our CNI faces evolves, so does our advice to owners and operators of CNI.

Our work helps keep our citizens safe, and protect the economy and our science and technological advantage, as well as the infrastructure upon which daily life depends. We help organisations understand the range of threats they and the UK face, for example from terrorism, espionage, and state actors, and importantly what they can do to minimise their risk through how they operate day to day. We support the most critical organisations in the UK, the wider public sector, industry, SMEs as well as the general public. When incidents occur, we provide effective incident response to minimise harm to the UK, help with recovery, and learn lessons for the future. 

NPSA publishes a range of tools, catalogues and standards to help evaluate and select measures that will effectively address needs. These can be found on our website. Similarly, NCSC publishes a Board Toolkit that helps boards to ensure that cyber resilience and risk management are embedded throughout an organisation, including its people, systems, processes and technologies.

We work across government and with industry partners to bolster the resilience of the UK’s CNI. But ensuring the resilience of our CNI is a constant effort, and our work with the Critical 5 - who face similar challenges and threats as the UK - is an important way to share international expertise and best practices. Resilience is, ultimately, a whole-of-society endeavour, and with our international colleagues, we hope that shining a light on this during CISM will help our nations’ resilience.