Technology researcher and CEO, Compsoftnet Technologies, Taiwo Akinremi, has warned that the country’s power grid, banks, and hospitals face potential global cyber-attacks.
As such, Akinremi beckoned on the Federal Government to protect the country’s critical national infrastructure. He equally rallied the banks and other financial institutions to upgrade their defence mechanism against potential attacks.
According to him, the current era is defined by an urgent crisis and the severity of large-scale infrastructure disruptions because “today’s world runs on digital systems that control physical reality. These digital systems are critical infrastructures (CI) that underpin society’s glue and sustainability. They form the irreplaceable backbone of contemporary society. However, the dependency has become the new frontline in geopolitical conflict.
The stability of entire nations in Africa and across the world now hinges on a complex but fragile digital infrastructure.”
The researcher said critical infrastructure encompasses assets whose incapacity would cause a debilitating effect on national security, the economy, or public health. This includes sectors such as energy, water, healthcare, defence, transportation, and financial services.
According to him, the fundamental challenge in protecting these sectors lies not in the failure of a single component, but in their characteristic of interconnectedness and interdependence. A cyberattack in one sector can instantly cascade across others. “The consequence can range from water supply contamination, disrupting communication networks, halting transportation systems, and paralysing emergency services,” he stated.
Akinremi, whose research is at the intersection of resilience of critical infrastructure and governance, noted that addressing the complexity of threats against today’s threat landscape goes beyond conventional strategies to leveraging system thinking to provide the appropriate analytical lens for this environment.
He said complexity theory teaches that critical infrastructure operates as a non-linear system, meaning that simple cause-and-effect relationships often break down, and a small, seemingly insignificant change can have a disproportionate, emergent, and devastating impact across the network. This inherent complexity creates a foundational weakness that traditional models cannot adequately manage.
“While cybersecurity testbeds have emerged as an essential security mechanism to investigate and test security measures for securing cyber-physical systems, their importance is questioned due to the rapid increase of sophisticated attacks on critical infrastructure across the globe. Hence, the need for more research on the fidelity of the application of a cybersecurity testbed for protecting critical infrastructure and most especially when it is used in developing the next generation of cybersecurity professionals mastering the art of securing information technology and operational technology systems,” he stressed.
Further, in recent research conducted by Akinremi, water and wastewater infrastructure cybersecurity of water systems requires system thinking as the blueprint of defence because water infrastructure spans distant geographical environments and interconnects with other digital systems.
According to him, the era of geopolitical instability and digital dependency demands a new way of thinking because the threat environment is systemic, and therefore, the defence must be systemic.
“By committing to the System Thinking approach or models to capture non-linear interdependencies, and validating defence mechanisms in specialised cybersecurity testbeds, would lead to a necessary framework to identify crucial blind spots in the IT/OT convergence, and measure resilience maturity with scientific rigour, which would therefore lead to governance strategies that are underpinned by scientific rigour.
“Recognising the increasing attack vectors and vulnerabilities of national critical infrastructure requires urgent actions to secure the complex infrastructure that sustains modern life. The time for siloed, reactive security has passed. Now is the time to implement the blueprint for systemic resilience today or face the devastating consequences of complexity exploited,” he stated.
