At the 2022 NATO Summit, US President Joe Biden and other world leaders committed to “building resilience against transnational threats,” particularly those that threaten cyberspace. This comes in the wake of the 3,900% uptick in cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure — gas pipelines, steel production, logistics operations, and ship navigation, among others — between 2013 and 2020. 

In fact, a recent act of sabotage derailed Northern Germany’s railway system when the critical cable system for the GSM-R rail communications network was harmed, causing a serious train traffic outage. While in this instance the damage was physical rather than in the cybersphere, the incident demonstrated malicious actors’ growing intent to take critical infrastructure offline with potentially widespread effects.