The Ministry of Energy intends to create two industry-specific cyber centers in the electricity and oil and gas sectors on the basis of previously created cyber centers at NPC Ukrenergo and NJSC Naftogaz, Farid Safarov, Deputy Minister of Energy for Digital Development, Digital Transformation and Digitalization, has said.

"The Ministry of Energy sent a draft order to the Cabinet of Ministers on the definition of two industry centers. In it, the two cyber centers created on the basis of Naftogaz and Ukrenergo were referred to as industry cyber centers. It is assumed that Ukrenergo will be responsible for the energy sector, for the oil and gas industries – Naftogaz," Safarov said at an online briefing "Cyber Threats in War: Cyber Attacks on Ukraine's Regional Power Distribution Company" on Tuesday.

According to him, such proposals were developed as part of an agreement with the National Security and Defense Council and the Security Service of Ukraine, as well as interaction with the government's CERT-UA computer incident response team.

The Deputy Minister explained that the sectoral cyber centers will be built on the principle of a pyramid.

"At the first level, the enterprises themselves must carry out organizational and technical actions in order to prevent possible damage, above them there is the level of monitoring of industry centers based on Ukrenergo and Naftogaz, which, in turn, are already interacting directly with key cybersecurity stakeholders," Safarov explained the mechanism.

In his opinion, the creation of such industry centers will significantly enhance the cyber defense of energy facilities, which are the most vulnerable group of critical infrastructure.

"In order to simplify the work of colleagues from CERT-UA, to coordinate and make their intervention more effective precisely at critical moments, we are building this architecture," the Deputy Minister noted.

As reported, since the beginning of the war, the number of cyberattacks on energy infrastructure facilities has almost doubled – over 200,000 cyberattacks were committed in 47 days of the war, while 900,000 of them were recorded over entire 2021.