6 June 2025, 07:30

By EJ Ward

Few services are more critical than energy in keeping our society running. April’s mass blackouts, which affected Spain and Portugal’s electricity grids, left millions without power for more than half a day.

The incident exemplified the extent of disruption caused by outages, as towns and cities were plunged into darkness and transport and communications networks were shut down.

While a cyberattack has been ruled out in the Spain case, the cybersecurity risk to all energy networks persists and is in fact growing in line with broader geopolitical tensions.

According to Thales’ Data Threat Report—a global survey of cybersecurity professionals—93% of critical infrastructure companies, including essential utilities such as gas, electricity and water, reported an increase in cyberattacks over the last year, with 42% suffering a data breach of some kind.

An additional warning came in May, with the publication of a report by the UK Public Accounts Committee. It warned that hostile states and criminals have developed their capability to disrupt public services and critical national infrastructure (CNI) faster than the Government expected.

Staying ahead of emerging threats will require energy operators to adopt a mindset of continuous assurance, smarter system design and proactive skills development—going beyond........

© LBC