Analytical Review of the Resilience of Ukraine’s Critical Energy Infrastructure to Cyber Threats in Times of War

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has led to a significant increase in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in Ukraine, with the energy sector being a primary target. The goal of these cyber attacks is to support military operations on the battlefield. Enhancing the resilience of the energy sector is a primary and urgent assignment for the security and defense sector of Ukraine.This study aims to identify the cyber resilience factors of critical energy infrastructure and their possible dependencies and analyze the causes of their occurrence.Accordingly, an analysis of the problems of the resilience of the critical energy infrastructure in Ukraine has been carried out. Based on this analysis, we have identified and studied some dependencies between cyber security for power energy infrastructure and other sectors, often referred to as cascade effects. By analyzing cause-and-effect relationships in power outages, the prerequisites for the emergence of negative factors affecting the resilience of critical infrastructure in the conditions of war have been determined.Using the obtained information about cascade effects, procedures have been proposed to enhance resilience. These include implementing processes for collecting and processing big data on cyber statistics, optimizing public-private cooperation, and organizing cyber training.The goal of these processes is to increase the level of cyber security for critical infrastructure. These processes are aimed at increasing the effectiveness of responding to cyber security crises in conditions of limited time and material resources.The experience of Ukraine in conducting such research is unique. This can become the basis for the development of models and architectures for the resilience of electric power systems in other countries.