The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have issued urgent warnings about a growing wave of ransomware gangs and unsophisticated cyber actors targeting U.S. critical infrastructure. Recent attacks underscore a dual threat: on one hand, advanced adversaries are deploying stealthy, constantly evolving techniques to breach networks; on the other, less sophisticated intruders are exploiting vulnerable operational technology (OT) environments. This surge in malicious activity is amplified by the complexity and fragmentation of public sector networks, particularly those underpinning essential services such as energy, water, healthcare, and transportation. These systems, often outdated or poorly segmented, present a ripe target for actors seeking disruption or ransom.
Traditional perimeter-based security can’t keep up with today’s evolving threats. Public sector agencies and critical infrastructure operators need a smarter, more adaptive approach. Security graphs, and artificial intelligence-powered (AI) analytics, offer real-time visibility into relationships between users, devices, and applications enabling proactive detection and rapid containment. This shift from reactive to continuous, intelligent security is essential for protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure.
Real-Time Containment at Mission Speed
As cyber threats grow in sophistication, the window to detect and respond is rapidly shrinking. Nation-state-level attacks and ransomware payloads can escalate from initial intrusion to full-scale disruption in a matter of minutes, leaving little room for manual intervention. Government agencies and critical infrastructure operators responsible for maintaining essential services can’t afford slow, reactive approaches. The need for speed, precision, and automation in incident response is increasingly critical.
AI-driven security innovations are revolutionizing the cybersecurity landscape, redefining how organizations detect, prevent, and respond to threats. These algorithms can analyze behavioral patterns across diverse environments in real time, identifying anomalies that signal emerging threats. They automatically prioritize high-impact risks, recommend containment strategies, and can trigger actions like dynamic segmentation or system isolation to limit the blast radius. What was once a manual, hours-long response process becomes an automated, mission-speed operation, crucial for minimizing downtime and ensuring continuity of vital public services.
Mapping Modern Threats
Today’s cyber threats often penetrate networks quietly, evading detection for weeks. This prolonged access enables lateral movement, data theft, and coordinated disruption. Traditional, siloed security tools can’t keep up. Agencies and operators need real-time, contextual visibility across their digital environments. Security graphs are uniquely designed to provide this by mapping relationships between users, devices, systems, and data across both IT and OT networks.
When powered by AI, security graphs become intelligent detection and response engines. They can uncover hidden attack paths, identify unusual behavior, and visualize high-risk connections across hybrid environments. By turning raw telemetry into actionable insight, AI-enhanced graphs enable faster, more informed decisions, helping agencies detect threats early, respond quickly, and strengthen overall cyber resilience.
Ensuring Your Security Graph is Effective
In the same way battlefield maps support commanders in making informed tactical and strategic decisions, security graphs provide security teams with insight into the complexity of interconnected systems. To be truly effective, security graphs must draw from a wide range of data sources. By combining diverse telemetry and context, the graph transforms into a powerful tool for understanding relationships, detecting threats, and guiding a response across complex IT and OT environments. Each data source plays a unique role in enriching the graph and enhancing situational awareness.
- Network traffic data provides critical visibility into how systems communicate, using flow logs, telemetry, and network events to identify connections and detect potential lateral movement across environments.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM) data captures details about user identities, roles, permissions, and access patterns, helping security teams recognize anomalous behavior, compromised accounts, or privilege escalation attempts.
- Vulnerability data from scanners and assessments highlights weaknesses in applications, systems, and configurations, enabling the graph to map out potential attack vectors before adversaries can exploit them.
- Endpoint data offers insight into local activity on servers, workstations, and devices, including running processes and applications, which provides context to assess the health and behavior of individual assets.
- Cloud inventory data includes information about cloud resources, configurations, and dependencies, which is essential for achieving full visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- Configuration Management Database (CMDB) data adds structured context about assets and their relationships, enriching the graph’s ability to understand infrastructure interdependencies and support incident response.
When these data sources are integrated into a single, unified view, security teams gain the visibility and context needed to detect threats earlier, respond faster, and better protect critical systems.
Strengthening Resilience Across Operational Environments
Resilience in cybersecurity goes beyond responding to attacks but rather it’s about adapting, learning, and maintaining continuity in the face of evolving threats. To prevent operational disruption, agencies and operators need tools that not only react to incidents but also anticipate and prepare for them. AI-enhanced systems play a key role by enabling continuous risk assessment and offering real-time insights that strengthen both immediate defenses and long-term strategies.
These systems can identify vulnerabilities as new threats emerge, map interdependencies across services and infrastructure to guide disaster recovery planning and simulate attack scenarios to test and improve response capabilities. Much like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) revolutionized emergency response by mapping flood zones and evacuation routes, security graphs now offer a digital blueprint for cyber resilience helping agencies understand their risk landscape and reinforce preparedness at every level.
A Strategic Imperative for the Public Sector
Evolving cyber threats demand smarter, faster, and more adaptive defenses that can keep pace with the speed and complexity of modern attacks. Security graphs, combined with AI-powered analytics, are no longer optional; they are mission-critical tools for identifying risks, detecting intrusions, and responding in real time. To protect national infrastructure and ensure the continuity of essential services, public sector agencies and critical infrastructure operators must prioritize investments in intelligent visibility and automated response capabilities that strengthen resilience and reduce the impact of emerging threats.
About the Author
Gary Barlet is the Public Sector Chief Technology Officer, at Illumio, where he is responsible for working with government agencies, contractors and the broader ecosystem to build in Zero Trust Segmentation as a strategic component of the government Zero Trust architecture. Previously, Gary served as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Office of the Inspector General, United States Postal Service. He has held key positions on several CIO staffs, including the Chief of Ground Networks for the Air Force CIO and Chief of Networks for the Air National Guard CIO, where he was responsible for information technology policy and providing technical expertise to senior leadership. He is a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the United States Air Force, where he served as a Cyberspace Operations Officer for 20 years.
Gary can be reached online at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-barlet-4384115/ and at our company website https://www.illumio.com/
