{"id":215208,"date":"2026-02-19T06:02:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T11:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/19\/the-caracas-operation-suggests-cyber-was-part-of-the-plan-just-not-the-whole-operation\/"},"modified":"2026-02-19T06:02:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T11:02:00","slug":"the-caracas-operation-suggests-cyber-was-part-of-the-plan-just-not-the-whole-operation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/19\/the-caracas-operation-suggests-cyber-was-part-of-the-plan-just-not-the-whole-operation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Caracas operation suggests cyber was part of the plan \u2013 just not the whole operation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/venezuela-blackout-cyberattack-vs-kinetic-damage-operation-absolute-resolve\/\">The Caracas operation suggests cyber was part of the plan \u2013 just not the whole operation<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/venezuela-blackout-cyberattack-vs-kinetic-damage-operation-absolute-resolve\/\">https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/venezuela-blackout-cyberattack-vs-kinetic-damage-operation-absolute-resolve\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-02-19 06:02:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"cyberscoop.com\">cyberscoop.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The dominant narrative has framed the Jan. 3 Caracas power outage during the mission to capture Venezuelan leader Nicol\u00e1s Maduro as a \u201cprecision cyberattack.\u201d But publicly available information points to a more complicated picture: videos, photographs, and accounts published from Caracas show significant physical damage to at least three Venezuelan substations. Experts who reviewed that material say the observed kinetic damage could, on its own, account for the outages\u2014raising questions about how much of the outage can be confidently attributed to cyber activity alone.<\/p>\n<p>These experts say Operation Absolute Resolve appears to have involved more than a stand-alone \u201ccyber blackout,\u201d despite the framing of many early accounts. In their view, cyber operations may have played some role, but the visible physical attacks alone could plausibly explain the outages\u2014and that kinetic dimension is largely absent from the dominant narrative.<\/p>\n<p>Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a former director of operations at US Indo-Pacific Command and now a senior cybersecurity expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, described the outage to CyberScoop as part of \u201ca campaign that likely took months to source cyber targets, days to work kinetic targets, and then integrated them into a single campaign plan that took a night.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>How the outage is framed matters because it can shape accountability, influence how governments and utilities prioritize grid security, and affect perceptions of offensive cyber capabilities. If the episode is widely presented as a \u201ccyber-only\u201d success without clear, corroborated evidence, it may encourage outsized conclusions about what cyber tools can accomplish on their own. Over time, that framing can steer policy and spending toward the wrong lessons\u2014emphasizing digital defenses while giving less attention to physical vulnerabilities that may be just as consequential.<\/p>\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-how-cyber-blackout-became-the-headline\">How \u2018cyber blackout\u2019 became the&#8230;<\/h4>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/venezuela-blackout-cyberattack-vs-kinetic-damage-operation-absolute-resolve\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Caracas operation suggests cyber was part of the plan \u2013 just not the whole&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-215208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-cybersecurity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215208"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}