The US government is making renewed efforts to protect power utilities, water supplies, and other critical industries from cyberattacks, AP reported.

“Our aim is to ensure that control systems serving 50,000 or more Americans have the core technology to detect and block malicious cyber activity," Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser, said in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. "That’s it in a sentence. Clear, clean goal, but it’s going to take a lot of work to get there.”

Public-private partnerships reflect administration's concerns about the vulnerability of critical systems, including power grids and wastewater treatment plants, to catastrophic hacks.

The threat is mounting as more utility systems are connected to the Internet, and the Biden administration wants to make rapid progress in blocking any attacks.

In the meantime, the administration tried to respond to two major cyber-incursions for the first 60 days. In the first case, hackers injected malicious code into a software update distributed to thousands of government agencies and private companies.

Second, an even larger hack has affected thousands of Microsoft Exchange mail servers. According to the company, the hacking was carried out by Chinese and hackers.