The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) represents an autonomous, network-based international organization countering hybrid threats. Their insight builds on a previous "food for thought" paper in light of the current geopolitical landscape, providing with a perspective view relating to the realm of hybrid threats and critical infrastructure systems.

With the war in Ukraine, incidents have been reported across a variety of sectors, including energy, telecommunications, transport, and healthcare highlighting a series of suspicions about the deliberate sabotage of critical infrastructure, cyber intrusion, or the readiness for such activity.

Increased publicity about suspicious activity against critical infrastructure is in line with the strategy of hybrid threat actors to weaken situational awareness, and create ambiguity and fear among democratic societies to impact the decision-making capability of political leaders. In the current security environment, targeting critical infrastructure with attacks may also represent significant escalation potential. Potentially, in such scenario the goal of hybrid threat actors could be for the activity to occur without clear attribution and to potentially lead to division within the targeted country or institutions.

Consequently, any kind of vague attribution may provide fertile ground for information operations to weaken public support for retaliatory action and impact the decision-making on whether an attack warrants a collective response in the first place. Thus, detecting hybrid threat activity in its early stages, the use of indisputable facts to identify actors as well as capability of debunking the false narratives can help enhance resilience.

In the same vein, attribution either may increase the chance of conflict escalation or provide a “safety valve” for a state short of escalation (de-escalation).

In any case of potential attacks on critical infrastructure, any unintentional signaling of lack of resolve and collective will should be avoided, which could undermine efforts to deter hybrid threat activity.