In August 2017, a petrochemical company with a plant in Saudi Arabia was hit with a cyberattack aiming not to simply destroy data but to sabotage the firm’s operations and trigger an explosion.

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order today to bolster the government’s cybersecurity and protect critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. 

The British government has issued a civil nuclear cybersecurity strategy to protect the industry against cyber attacks.

A survey of U.S. oil and gas cybersecurity risk managers indicates that the deployment of cybersecurity measures in the industry isn’t keeping pace with the growth of digitalization in oil and gas operations.

Agencies and authorities that provide water, wastewater and dam services don’t face the same regulatory hurdles as power utilities, but they’re also often smaller and have fewer resources, housed as they generally are within municipal governments or other smaller entities.

Firms supplying essential services – such as energy, transport, banking and health, or digital services – such as search engines and cloud services, will have to improve their ability to withstand cyber attacks under the first EU-wide rules on cybersecurity, approved by the European Parliament in July.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is starting a new research effort to help CISOs better manage cybersecurity within critical infrastructure companies. Exxon Mobil Corp. and Schneider Electric SE are early members of the consortium, according to MIT.