Dynamic Risk Assessment For Critical National Infrastructures
2026-04-10 , Rookie, Student and Careers Track

This talk addresses the challenges Critical National Infrastructures (CNIs) face during on-going adversarial campaigns as they could cause physical damaged and even threaten life. Defenders struggle to keep CNIs operational (albeit at reduced capacity) whilst they try to wipe attackers out of their systems. By monitoring network telemetry, we will explore how we can identify in near-real-time different ways a campaign could escalate to an unsafe state and place the minimum mitigations required to keep CNIs operational.


Since Critical National Infrastructures (CNIs) have become one of the main targets for nation state threat actors, keeping them both safe and operational during an adversarial campaign is particularly challenging. Especially the increase of their interconnectivity with Internet devices is exposing them to even more potential attack paths, making risk identification and consequently incident handling impossible. Traditional risk assessment methods fall short to address the rapidly evolving nature of vulnerability landscape. Hence, there is a need for a near-real-time dynamic risk assessment approach which aims to keep a CNI operational during an on-going attack, albeit at reduced capacity, by applying the minimum necessary mitigations. We suggest a model which identifies how/if an adversarial campaign could potentially escalate to an unsafe state of the CNI, such as physical damage or threatening life, and isolates the part of the network that could lead to such escalation. This approach combines Fault Tree Analysis, Dempster-Shafer Theory and the MITRE ATT&CK framework for deriving a near-real-time model which can adapt while an attack unfolds.

PhD student in Cybersecurity at University of Bristol