Critical Infrastructure Orgs Are Looking to Operationalize Threat Intelligence with Sharing and Collaboration Capabilities

April 9, 2025

That is Why Over 90% of Global ISACs Turn to Cyware.

Netflix’s Zero Day series is not science fiction. Cyberwarfare has long since jumped off the screen and into our countries and communities. Critical infrastructure organizations are on the front lines and are highly aware that protecting the power and water supplies today means a lot more than surveillance cameras and locked gates. However, the SCADA systems many have inherited and the legacy security systems many have installed (years back) are starting to show signs of age, leaving a vacuum which many essential utilities are now trying to fill. None of this is especially “new” news. However, where they are looking for solutions might be. “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” is a powerful adage, but many are looking to not just replace but upgrade their security systems. As they do, the ability to collaborate more smoothly and operationalize response more effectively becomes top of mind.

While the premium for the past decade and a half has been on “bigger” data, organizations now – especially emergency responders like the cybersecurity teams that defend critical infrastructure – are realizing that what they want is not so much more data, but the ability to manipulate it, share it, and use it better. And that’s what Cyware brings to the table. Which is why over nine out of ten ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers) in the world use it. Recent Critical Infrastructure Threats As noted in a recent article in Cyber Protection Magazine, “The distinctions between military and civilian infrastructure are rapidly blurring in the cyber domain. Hospitals, water utilities, transportation networks, and even personal smart devices have become prime targets for cyberattacks.”

In a digital world, here’s what essential utilities are up against:

Ransomware: A recent industry report noted that “2024 was a landmark year with...high-value sectors particularly pressured to pay ransoms to restore operations,” and just last month CISA put out an advisory about the Medusa ransomware strain, which “impacted over 300 victims from a variety of critical infrastructure sectors with affected industries including medical, education, legal, insurance, technology, and manufacturing.”
SCADA Attacks: Flaws in SCADA software can be fatal, like these ones found last month in systems made by ICONICS, which (if unpatched) could “lead to escalation of privileges, [denial of service] and in specific circumstances, even full system compromise.” Other critical SCADA vulnerabilities were discovered less than two weeks later, which “if exploited, could grant unauthorized access to industrial control networks, potentially leading to severe operational disruptions and financial losses.”
Supply Chain Threats: New research reveals that half of all critical infrastructure entities lack visibility into their supply chain, and that 36% believe they have already been victims of malicious infiltration without their superiors reporting it. As noted by one of the firm’s directors, “You can’t secure what you don’t know. Organizations need to better understand the vulnerabilities in their supply chains, employing approaches that provide greater oversight of suppliers.”
AI Meets Geopolitical Warfare: AI is lowering the bar for entry so any script kiddie can launch a decently sophisticated attack (purchased on the dark web, of course). With the guise of anonymity, there’s not much to lose by disseminating it far and wide. Again, AI makes even that easy, despite country borders and language boundaries – all a non-issue for AI-crafted attacks. As geopolitical tensions heat up, governments have shown they’re not above striking to the heart of essential services and threatening the utilities that keep a society intact. It’s all seen as part of the broader strategy of war, and AI-crafted attacks make it possible at scale.

Cybersecurity defenders need to keep their heads on a swivel when it comes to protecting high-value industrial entities. But considering these external threats and historic internal architectural challenges, this can be hard. The Problem: Today’s Issues meet Yesterday’s Tools Considering the fact that many utilities still struggle to fully staff a fully functional SOC, the combination of increased global threats, complex internal architecture, and lack of on-hand support creates dangerous conditions for many of the critical utilities of the world.

What these teams need is to get a handle on all of the threat data out there and make it actionable fast. What “yesterday’s tools” are equipped to do is produce a lot of raw threat data – but it’s coming from different places, it’s un-corroborated, it’s unfiltered, and it creates a lot of noise. By the time teams sift through what they have (if they can sift through it all on a semi-regular basis), there’s a good chance that attackers will already have gotten the upper hand. These outdated security toolkits:

Lack real-time threat intelligence sharing. This leads to slower response times.
Clunky integration between threat intelligence sources and boots-on-the-ground security tools. This lack of coordinated response loses even more time and adds friction to the process.
Are often not calibrated to the latest compliance requirements, leaving more work to be done by SOCs or simply leaving the company vulnerable.

So much of cyber defense these days is leaning towards proactive, not reactive, security. We don’t have time to sit and wait to be attacked anymore, and critical infrastructure least of all. But with traditional threat intelligence tools creating unreasonable amounts of work, they aren’t serving the purpose for which they are intended – to get actionable data to SOCs in time to let them mount a proactive defense.

Case In Point: EU-Based Water Authority at Crossroads with Aged-Out Tools The good news is that as traditional tools “age out,” we find critical utilities are more likely to look for new solutions than renew old contracts with limited toolkits. Considering the global threat landscape as it relates to critical infrastructure, threat visibility is at a premium right now, with the ability to quickly action on that intelligence a close second (if not a tie).

When the current solution isn’t ticking both of those boxes, teams look for an alternative as soon as they get the chance. Recently, a computer emergency response team (CERT) at a European waterboard needed to upgrade their tools. The response team works by optimizing operational information security across the country’s water management sector; in other words, making sure the threat intelligence that flowed to national water utilities was actionable and ready to use. The CERT team joined 92% of the world’s ISACs in making that choice, as over nine out of ten Information Sharing and Analysis Centers rely on our unique platform to make global threat intelligence more readable, more operational, and more useful.

The Solution: Threat Intelligence Platforms That Do Some Heavy Lifting Cyware’s Threat Intelligence Management is a market-leading platform operationalized threat intelligence and collective defense. It acknowledges the problem of too much threat data, too many siloes, and not enough corroboration of the facts. In other words, threat platforms that leave too much up to the SOCs to do, draining the time they already don’t have.

Cyware’s powerful Threat Intelligence Management platform:

Assimilates threat data from any tool: SIEM, EDR, IDS/IPS, external threat feeds, etc.
Features easy integration via multiple feeds and API connections.
Processes both structured and unstructured data.
Enriches alerts with Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), corroborates threat intelligence, cleans it of duplicates and redundancies, and delivers actionable insights to SOCs.
Integrates threat intelligence seamlessly with existing security tools for rapid incident response.

And more. Cyware even improves internal processes, providing CERT teams with the ability to quickly disseminate information through a centralized portal so they can keep their constituents up to date through a single pane of glass and offering rapid deployment and vendor support. As cybercriminals enjoy the natural advantages of AI and an increasingly digitized critical infrastructure culture, these same utilities can fight back by getting threat intelligence that is pre-packaged and ready to go.

With the Cyware platform’s ability to do the heavy lifting of assembling, vetting, standardizing, prioritizing, and optimizing threat data, all critical utilities will have to worry about is using it.

Check out the CERT-WM Case Study today.

Want to see Cyware’s Threat Intelligence Management platform in action? Browse its capabilities or request a demo.