Fitters fix an element during construction work on Swissgrid’s high-voltage line grid project. Energy is a critical infrastructure sector.
Keystone / Peter Schneider
The threat of malicious attacks on Swiss power, telecommunications and transport is rising in tandem with armed conflict and artificial intelligence capabilities. That’s a risk for the Alpine nation, but also for its European neighbours, in an increasingly connected world.
Barely a day goes by without a new cyberattack on Switzerland’s critical infrastructure.
Facilities vital to a stable society and economy – from energy and finance to healthcare, food and transport – face near-daily assaults from the likes of criminal gangs or hostile states, according to the government’s first semi-annual release of data on the problem.
That’s a concern not just for Switzerland. The mountainous central European country is a hub for energy, telecoms and transport links between Germany, France and Italy. Its hydroelectric dams high in the Alps act as giant batteries, helping to smooth out Europe’s volatile solar and wind generation by storing and releasing power as needed.
“Cyberattacks do not stop at organisational, industry or national borders,” said Florian Schütz, Director of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which published half-year figures on critical infrastructure at the end of March. “Alongside the persistent threat posed by cybercrime, organisations must also contend with increasingly sophisticated attacks by state-sponsored actors pursuing strategic interests.”
Critical infrastructure operators, ordered from last April to reveal any cyberattacks within 24 hours, reportedExternal link 145 of them during the second half of last year, the centre said.
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Why Switzerland is struggling with its national defence
As well as tightening reporting rules, Switzerland’s Federal Council is drawing up plans to strengthen its response to threats, including drafting laws by the end of this year on standards for reliability and resilience, and protecting data essential to security.
Recent events in Europe illustrate the risks of sabotage and spying by adversaries. The French national cybersecurity agency suspects attacks in the second half of 2025 on public services, telecoms, finance and transport involved groups with links to Russian and Chinese intelligence services, according to the NCSC’s security report.
While Switzerland didn’t appear to suffer from any cybersabotageExternal link on industrial systems in that same period, Luxembourg’s mobile network was knocked out for hours on July 23, affecting emergency phone numbers, internet access and online banking services.
The world is changing, strikes on infrastructure and the ‘new kind of warfare’:
Ukraine, Iran and artificial intelligence
Conflicts in Europe and the Middle East only elevate the threat, with Russia’s war on Ukraine entering a fourth year and Iran retaliating against bombing from the US and Israel by targeting their foreign interests and allies. The spread of artificial intelligence adds to risks, with AI company Anthropic warning this month that its latest MythosExternal link model had found decades-old vulnerabilities in software used widely in critical infrastructure and that such information could be used to crash systems remotely.
Christian Dussey, Federal
Intelligence Service Director.
Keystone / Alessandro Della Valle
“Switzerland must view its security situation within a global context,” Federal Intelligence Service Director Christian Dussey said on the release of the agency’s most recent situation reportExternal link last July. “The global confrontation affects us directly. Our strategic radar is currently tracking 15 crisis hotspots simultaneously. We have never experienced such a density of threats.”
The country is vulnerable to cyber or physical assaults by state actors who seek to harm other nations, alliances or institutions that rely on Swiss critical infrastructure, the intelligence agency wrote in the report.
Switzerland at centre of European grid
One such example is Switzerland’s key role within the European electricity system.
The so-called synchronousExternal link network links up countries’ power grids across the continent, allowing them to balance out any excess demand with supply from other parts of the region. Switzerland is a hub for electricity transmitted across the Alps between Europe’s largest economies, as well as for storing reserve energy in its hydroelectric reservoirs.
Wolfgang Kröger,
emeritus professor at ETH Zurich and a specialist in infrastructure risk.
Courtesy of
Still, what makes the structure efficient and reliable, also makes it vulnerable.External link
“Cascading failures across borders are possible and have happened,” Wolfgang Kröger, an emeritus professor at federal technology institute ETH Zurich and a specialist in infrastructure risk, told Swissinfo.
“Disturbances and abnormal load flows can penetrate into the Swiss grid from the outside; they need to be managed effectively by the system operator,” he said. “The biggest vulnerabilities may result from potential cyberattacks as the network of growing complexity is controlled, monitored and managed by sophisticated digital systems.”
The first successful cyberattack on an electricity grid took place in Ukraine in 2015 as Russian hackers plunged 230,000 consumers into darkness. More recently, American agencies warnedExternal link in April that Iranian-linked hackers were targeting US power and water.
Vulnerabilities from cyber to transport
Beyond energy, Switzerland is central to Europe’s fibre-optic backbone, routing large volumes of the continent’s internet traffic through its exchange points. Its rail and road freight network is also tied into regional supply chains, delivering everything from food to hightech parts and equipment essential for European manufacturing.
In 2023, a single broken train wheel led to a derailment that blocked the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world’s longest and deepest railway tunnel and a crucial thoroughfare for cargo between Germany and Italy. It took more than a year for the tunnel to fully reopen.External link
Given its mountainous terrain, the country has often had to respond to such incidents.
“Switzerland has a tradition of addressing and managing rare or high-consequence events, notably natural hazards,” Kröger said. “Malicious attacks are treated separately.”
The country has so far avoided the kind of kinetic attacks on infrastructure suffered by other European nations. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk last year blamed Russian intelligence agentsExternal link for blowing up railway lines with military grade plastic explosives.
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Resilience, redundancy, replacement
Such events show the need for preparation against physical attacks on infrastructure.
Authorities need to ensure high resilience not just by avoiding disruptions but being prepared for rapid restoration or replacement of services. That includes stockpiling parts that are difficult to procure at short notice, such as large power transformers, as well as running predictive simulations to find weak points, according to Kröger.
In February, Switzerland’s Federal CouncilExternal link said it would move forward with plans to improve the resilience and data security of systems essential to the country’s economy and daily life, including energy, healthcare and telecoms. The measures would bring in binding standards for reliability of critical infrastructure and clearer rules on how sensitive data must be protected by federal authorities, cantons and operators.
Further action that might introduce essential redundancy into systems so they can cope with a crisis, would likely be expensive as spare equipment has to be bought and stored. As a result, Switzerland needs to be clear on who will carry the burden of funding them.
Someone will have to pay
“Financing costly measures to strengthen resilience needs a clear legislative framework and regulatory mechanism, for example, to compensate private companies with public funds and/or consumers [paying] a slight increase of electricity tariff,” Kröger said.
Such funding needs will come on top of defence spending that’s already increasing.
For 2026, the government requested CHF 3.4 billionExternal link for its security requirements, with a focus on air defence, protection against drones and cybersecurity. The largest share will go towards expanding ground-to-air defence systems and replacing short range air defence capabilities. Other money will go on countering mini-drone threats, a new semi-stationary radar system and cyber capabilities.
Edited Tony Barrett/vm/gw
