CISA tells critical organizations to prepare for cyber outages
CISA tells critical organizations to prepare for cyber outages
Publish Date: 2026-05-05 17:46:00
Source Domain: federalnewsnetwork.com
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – fresh out of the longest shutdown in government history and ready to begin hiring again after shedding staff for the past year – is out with new cybersecurity crisis planning guidance for critical infrastructure organizations.
CISA’s new “CI Fortify” initiative notably pushes water utilities, the transportation sector and other critical infrastructure organizations to plan for a “geopolitical crisis” involving cyber attacks that could sever their connections to internet, telecommunications and other technology services.
CISA’s guidance features two primary emergency planning objectives: “isolation” and “recovery” to mitigate threats. The former involves “proactively disconnecting from third-party and business networks” to safeguard operational technology, such as industrial control systems, from cyber attack during a crisis. CISA says organizations should be prepared to sustain “essential operations” rather than completely shutting down.
“Recovery” involves documenting systems, backing up critical files, and practicing “the replacement of systems or the transition to manual” in case a cyber attack shuts down critical systems, according to CISA.
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CISA says it plans to perform “targeted assessments” of how prepared certain critical infrastructure organizations are to meet CI Fortify’s objectives. CISA is prioritizing “defense critical infrastructure,” meaning systems that are crucial to military forces and operations, including dams, radars, weapon systems, satellite communications and other facilities.
Acting CISA Director Nick Andersen said the cyber agency has already started evaluating some organizations, which he declined to identify.
“We’ve already started to kick off the first couple of assessments under a pilot phase of this initiative that is already up and moving,”…
