Canada Raises the Bar for Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity. Is Your Network Ready?

Canada has taken a significant step toward strengthening national cyber resilience.

With Royal Assent now granted to Bill C-8, the Government of Canada is establishing a new framework for protecting critical cyber systems and securing the country's most essential services. The legislation introduces new authorities under the Telecommunications Act and enacts the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act (CCSPA), creating mandatory cybersecurity requirements for designated operators across federally regulated sectors.

For organizations operating critical infrastructure, this marks a transition from cybersecurity guidance to cybersecurity obligations.

The question is no longer whether cyber resilience programs should evolve. The question is how quickly organizations can gain the visibility and evidence they need to meet new expectations.

A New Era of Accountability for Critical Infrastructure

Bill C-8 applies to operators in sectors that Canadians rely on every day, including telecommunications, finance, energy, and transportation. The legislation establishes requirements for organizations to:

• Identify and protect critical cyber systems
• Establish and maintain cybersecurity programs
• Detect, manage, and report cyber incidents
• Mitigate supply chain and third-party risks
• Comply with new government directives and information-sharing requirements

While implementation details will continue to evolve through regulations, one reality is already clear: organizations cannot secure what they cannot see.

Modern attackers increasingly exploit gaps in visibility, leveraging encrypted traffic, unmanaged devices, cloud environments, and legitimate credentials to evade traditional security controls. Network activity remains one of the few sources of evidence adversaries cannot easily manipulate.

Compliance Requires More Than Logs

As regulatory requirements mature, critical infrastructure operators will need more than checkbox compliance exercises. They will need the ability to prove what happened, understand the scope of incidents, and demonstrate effective response capabilities.

High-fidelity network evidence plays a foundational role in achieving these outcomes by helping security teams:

• Detect threats that bypass endpoint controls
• Investigate incidents with greater speed and confidence
• Validate AI-generated findings with verifiable evidence
• Support regulatory reporting and audit requirements
• Reduce uncertainty during cyber events

This is especially important as organizations increasingly adopt AI-assisted security operations. Recent Corelight research found that the quality of underlying network data directly impacts AI performance, with richer network evidence significantly improving investigative accuracy and speed.

AI is only as effective as the evidence behind it.

Building Cyber Resilience With Provably Better Data

Cybersecurity outcomes improve when defenders have access to richer, more trustworthy evidence.

Corelight transforms network traffic into high-integrity telemetry built on open standards such as Zeek and Suricata, delivering the context security teams need to detect advanced threats, investigate incidents, and power AI-driven workflows.

Our approach helps organizations:

• Gain visibility across hybrid, cloud, and on-premises environments
• Identify malicious activity targeting critical systems
• Reduce reliance on fragmented or proprietary data sources
• Integrate network evidence into existing SIEM, SOAR, and AI ecosystems
• Enable explainable, evidence-backed security operations

As agentic AI becomes more common within the SOC, the ability to validate conclusions with transparent, defensible evidence becomes increasingly important. Corelight's high-fidelity network telemetry enables AI systems to move beyond predictions and toward provable outcomes.

Securing the Convergence of IT, OT, and IoT

By operating as an out-of-band, passive device on the network, Corelight ensures that defenders can safely monitor IT, OT, and IoT environments without disrupting operations. We natively parse specialized industrial protocols—such as Modbus, DNP3, BACnet, ENIP, S7comm, and more —alongside diverse IoT device behaviors. This provides precise, unalterable evidence of the exact commands and parameters traversing the network, allowing teams to detect unauthorized modifications before they impact physical operations.

Preparing for What's Next

Bill C-8 reflects a broader global trend: governments are placing greater emphasis on operational resilience, critical infrastructure protection, and demonstrable cybersecurity outcomes.

For Canadian organizations, the path forward starts with visibility.

The operators best positioned to succeed under the new regulatory framework will be those that can continuously monitor their environments, rapidly investigate threats, and provide defensible evidence when incidents occur.

As Canada's critical infrastructure landscape evolves, Corelight is ready to help organizations build the resilient, evidence-driven security operations needed to meet the moment.

Learn how Corelight's Provably Better Data helps organizations strengthen cyber resilience, accelerate investigations, and prepare for the future of AI-driven security operations.