Major critical infrastructure disruptions are inevitable, acting CISA chief says
Major critical infrastructure disruptions are inevitable, acting CISA chief says
Publish Date: 2026-06-17 12:43:00
Source Domain: www.cybersecuritydive.com
WASHINGTON — U.S. cybersecurity resilience in the face of sophisticated threats from China and other adversaries will increasingly depend on critical infrastructure’s ability to weather major disruptions, a top U.S. cyber official said Wednesday.
“Each and every one of us is operating right now on the front lines of a war that is never going to be cleared,” Nick Andersen, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said at ICS Village and the Institute for Security and Technology’s Critical Effect conference.
“We are going to see an adversarial disruption of our critical infrastructure,” Andersen said. “It’s going to have significant not just technical impact, it’s going to have a significant psychological impact on the safety of the American people. … We need to start operating like that’s the reality of where we’re at — that we’re not going to be able to keep everything persistently online and available as much as we would like.”
CISA’s emphasis on resilience marks a shift from earlier government cybersecurity doctrines that focused on preventing intrusions. In recent years, advanced nation-state hacking campaigns — especially Beijing’s Volt Typhoon espionage operation — have increasingly convinced government and industry strategists that their primary goal should be ensuring that infrastructure can continue operating during an attack.
“We have to start making some assumptions, like [that our] telecommunications infrastructure may be disrupted,” Andersen said at the Critical Effect conference, which focused on operational technology cybersecurity issues. “Why? Because the telecommunications infrastructure is going to be disrupted.”
To support national resilience efforts, the federal government has spent years trying to make a list of the most important infrastructure assets that accounts for complex interdependencies and…
