Canada’s Warning on Critical Infrastructure Threats Underscores a Growing North American Challenge

A recent report from Industrial Cyber highlights a significant alert issued by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security: nation-state actors and organized criminal groups are escalating their targeting of critical infrastructure sectors. This concern was reinforced in a November 26, 2025 joint statement by the Government of Canada, through the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE), which warned that malicious cyber activity against Canada’s power, water, health, finance, and transportation systems “are on the rise and are a real and urgent threat.” Power grids, water systems, healthcare networks, and manufacturing operations all remain in the crosshairs as adversaries increasingly leverage ransomware, remote-access exploitation, and supply-chain intrusion techniques.

Although the warning is directed at Canadian operators, the implications extend far beyond national borders. Critical infrastructure across North America is deeply interconnected; technically, commercially, and operationally. A compromise in one environment can quickly influence another.

A Spotlight on ICS/OT Vulnerabilities

One of the report’s most important observations is the continued exposure of industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT). Many of these devices were engineered decades ago with safety and reliability in mind, not cybersecurity. As a result:

• Remote access remains overly permissive in some environments
• Default or weak credentials continue to be exploited
• Patch cycles for ICS/OT differ significantly from IT systems
• Increased connectivity, including IoT adoption, expands the attack surface

This mismatch between legacy engineering and modern cyber threats creates a persistent vulnerability that adversaries understand well.

Visibility Across the Ecosystem Is Now Essential

The report also notes a rise in criminal and state-aligned activities targeting essential services. The motivations vary; financial gain, geopolitical signaling, disruption of public trust but the tactics share common characteristics: stealth, speed, and an ability to exploit the weakest link in an ecosystem. That weak link is often not the operator itself, but a third-party service provider or software dependency.

A recurring theme across North American cyber incidents is the challenge of visibility. Operators frequently lack insight into:

• The true security posture of their vendors
• Externally observable vulnerabilities across their attack surface
• How emerging threats map to their specific environments

Without that visibility, organizations struggle to detect early indicators of compromise or validate whether resilience plans will hold under pressure.

Resilience Requires More Than Compliance

As Canada’s guidance emphasizes, baseline controls; MFA, segmentation, logging, patching, and tested incident-response plans remain essential. But long-term resilience requires a strategic shift:

• Treating cybersecurity as a core operational risk
• Considering the physical and safety impacts of cyber disruption
• Including supply-chain and third-party dependencies in risk models
• Exercising response plans that account for OT/ICS realities

In the critical infrastructure context, cybersecurity is not purely a technical challenge. It’s a public safety, economic stability, and national-security imperative.

A Shared Mission Across Borders

The U.S. and Canada share infrastructure touchpoints across energy, transportation, finance, and communications. Threat actors do not differentiate between jurisdictions and defenders must adopt that same cross-border perspective.

Strengthening resilience will require deeper collaboration among federal agencies, state and provincial governments, private-sector operators, and cybersecurity solution providers.

As part of this broader ecosystem, SecurityScorecard helps organizations improve situational awareness by providing externally observable insights into cyber risk, including across third-party and supply-chain environments. These insights complement internal tools and processes by giving operators a consistent, independent view of their external security posture.

While no single solution can eliminate risk, improving visibility and communication across the ecosystem is a foundational step toward resilience.

Conclusion

Canada’s warning is a reminder of the evolving threat landscape facing critical infrastructure operators. As adversaries sharpen their capabilities, the region’s interconnected systems and the people who depend on them require stronger visibility, preparedness, and collaboration.

Building resilience is not only possible; it is essential. And it begins with understanding where risk truly resides.