DG HOME has organised the latest CERIS INFRA workshop, that took place the 29^th of June 2021 and was focused on the European critical infrastructure protection, highlighting present policy developments in the field. Topical elements, such as the hybrid conceptual model and key factors in countering hybrid threats, were presented.

In the first part of the Workshop, special attention was given to the policy initiatives, especially the Critical Entities Resilience (CER) Directive and the revised Network and Information Systems (NIS2) Directive, as they will pave the way for Europe to enhance measures to critical infrastructure protection. New types of security concerns, such as hybrid threats in the context of critical infrastructure protection, were highlighted in the second part of the workshop.

The challenges of hybrid attacks to critical infrastructure were presented using a large scale physical and cyber-attack scenario (with the support of EU-HYBNET) that included three critical infrastructure fields such as water security (coordinated by STOP-IT), communication systems (coordinated by RESISTO), financial services (coordinated by FINSEC) under attack.

The objective of the breakout group was to examine a hybrid threat scenario aimed at critical infrastructure. During the breakout session the participants played the Training for Operational Resilience (TORC) game which was produced as an outcome of the Horizon 2020 project STOP-IT.  The objective of the game was to enhance awareness and preparedness in order to improve the actual response should a certain threat occur. Both short term actions for crisis management and long-term measures to increase preparedness were considered. Complexity related to interconnected physical-digital European infrastructures was especially highlighted in the scenarios. The participants were challenged to acknowledge how to increase security, resilience and design effective preventive, mitigating and preparedness-related measures to protect against and to respond to cascading effects and hybrid attacks.