Authors - Emine YAZICI, Alper UGUR Abstract - Critical infrastructures are of strategic importance to the security of societies, economic stability, and the continuity of public services. However, with digitalization, these infrastructures are facing progressively complex cyber threats such as supply chain exploitation, ransomware, and AI-assisted targeted attacks. Traditional hardening methods are becoming insufficient in the face of these developments. This study examines the types of attacks and threat trends that have emerged in the literature in recent years; and evaluates the effectiveness of hardening methods applied against them at the software, physical, and organ izational levels. The findings indicate that, due to the dynamic nature of threat vectors, utilized common risk analysis and hardening strategies are insufficient to deliver the expected security outcomes. However, the literature lacks a risk analysis score and hardening guide for decision-makers regarding current threat models and attack techniques. In this study, risk scores based on CVSS were cre ated for up-to-date threats in the ICS field, and hardening mechanisms were also proposed according to the mechanisms behind the related threats and their ef fects. We aim to address existing shortcomings to some extent by calculating the risk scores of new attacks and to make ICS more secure through proposed hard ening mechanisms against these risks. The sustainability of security can be achieved through holistic security policies that include multi-layered approaches, continuous monitoring, adaptive response mechanisms and advanced approaches such as Zero Trust architecture, AI-based anomaly detection, and hybrid defense systems in the domain where traditional measures fall short.
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