A new scan of internet-connected industrial equipment found over 4,000 Rockwell Automation and Allen-Bradley controllers exposed online, including 22 in cities impacted by cyberattacks on U.S. water systems.

The findings, published Wednesday by Forescout’s Vedere Labs, show that direct internet access to equipment used in water and wastewater operations remains common despite years of warnings from manufacturers and federal agencies.

The exposed devices use EtherNet/IP, an industrial protocol that allows for communication between control equipment, engineering workstations and other systems. When the port is open to the public internet, outside users may be able to identify devices and, depending on their setup, change settings or write new configurations.

The scan, run through the Shodan search engine Monday, found that 2,844 of the exposed controllers (65%) were in the United States.

The FBI and Environmental Protection Agency issued a joint advisory last week confirming attacks at water and wastewater utilities in at least 12 states since July 27. Officials have since named Michigan, South Dakota and Georgia among the affected states. Nine systems were hit in Michigan, and one wastewater lift station was hit in South Dakota.

Several reports have linked the attacks to Iranian actors, but Sai Molige, senior manager of threat hunting at Forescout, says the company has not attributed this activity to any actor or group.  

“The evidence supports opportunistic, at-scale exploitation of a known class of vulnerabilities affecting internet-exposed devices,” Molige told CyberScoop. “The scale and speed of the activity are more consistent with mass scanning and enumeration than with zero-day exploitation, a months-long intrusion campaign, or custom malware.”

The advisory said attackers targeted programmable logic controllers (PLCs) made by Rockwell Automation under its Allen-Bradley brand, specifically the MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 models. In at least one case, attackers reached controllers remotely and changed their IP addresses and passwords, cutting off the utility’s own view and control of the equipment. The advisory said the attacks caused pressure loss and flooding.

Forescout’s research states that the most common exposed device family was the MicroLogix 1400, which made up half of the devices found. Other versions, such as AllenBradley’s CompactLogix 1769 controllers, made up 22%. MicroLogix 1100 and ControlLogix 5590 devices each accounted for about 8%.

Forescout cross-referenced those machines against the recently targeted cities and municipalities and found 22 devices still exposed to the internet. However, the company did not say those systems had been attacked or that they belonged to the affected utilities.

The research also found that 19 of the 22 hosts in affected cities appeared, based on firmware versions, to be open to CVE-2017-16740, a remote code execution flaw disclosed in 2017 that impacts MicroLogix 1400 devices. An attacker would need Modbus TCP enabled to use that flaw, and the researchers could not confirm whether the affected systems had it enabled.

Rockwell Automation and other industrial equipment makers have warned customers not to place controllers directly on the public internet as far back as 2018.

Beyond the controllers, the researchers also looked at the digital records tied to these utilities. They found expired certificates, remote-access web addresses left unrenewed for months or years, and servers that appear abandoned — in one case, a server that has shown nothing but a default Microsoft webpage since April 2019. 

“These stale services can increase the attack surface; however, we have not yet confirmed how the observed attacks occurred,” Molige told CyberScoop.

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Last week, the FBI and EPA issued a joint alert that should concern anyone who drinks water in America–which is to say, everyone. Since July 27, water and wastewater utilities in at least seven states have reported cyberattacks against internet-facing programmable logic controllers (PLCs), the small industrial computers that run pumps, valves, and treatment equipment. Some of these attacks degraded operations. Utilities reported pressure loss and flooding, several systems reverted to manual control, and one Minnesota community declaring a local state of emergency.

Nothing about these attacks required sophisticated methods. The attackers didn’t use zero-day exploits or novel malware. They found controllers exposed to the public internet, many of them so old that they stopped receiving security patches years ago. They logged in, changed IP addresses and passwords, and locked operators out of their own equipment. In at least one case, they modified the ladder logic controlling industrial equipment. These were not Hollywood-style hacks. The controllers sat exposed and undefended.

If this feels familiar, it should. In late 2023, attackers compromised controllers at water utilities across several states, including the widely reported incident in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. The federal government issued guidance then, too. One of the crucial differences between then and now is that attackers have grown in ambition. They’ve moved from defacing screens to disrupting operations across dozens of systems at once, exploiting the fact that third-party integrators often deploy the same vulnerable configuration across many small utilities. 

The uncomfortable truth is that this was preventable. The reason it wasn’t stopped is more structural than technical. The United States has roughly 50,000 community water systems. Most are small, publicly funded, and run by operators whose primary job is keeping water safe and flowing. Cybersecurity ranks far below that, if it ranks at all. The devices in question are often a decade or more old and replacing them takes capital these utilities don’t have. Rules governing water cybersecurity remain mostly voluntary. Attackers understand these economics perfectly. We should too, yet these attacks keep happening.

 But inaction is a choice. The defenses that work here cost little and require no exotic technology. The FBI and EPA guidance is sound, and every water and wastewater organization should act on it this week, not later. Here’s how:

• Get controllers off the public internet. No PLC should be reachable from the outside world. Remote access should go through a secure gateway that mediates, monitors, and logs every connection. That includes cellular modems, which are the overlooked entry point in nearly every audit.
• Fix passwords. Default and shared credentials are still the most common way in. Strong, unique passwords are the cheapest security control available.
• Restrict communication between devices. Firewall rules and access control lists should allow only expected communication between known control system devices. Block traffic from hosting providers and other sources that have no business touching a water plant.
• Lock the logic. Keep physical and software key switches in the run position except during authorized updates. This prevents unauthorized changes to configuration and firmware.
• Practice running manually. The utilities that survived these attacks best were the those that switched to manual operations quickly. That skill requires constant practice.
• Verify, don’t assume. Nearly every utility believes its PLCs aren’t internet-exposed, right up until an inventory proves otherwise. You can’t protect what you can’t see. Most operators are surprised by what a complete asset inventory reveals: forgotten modems, integrator-installed remote access, devices nobody knew were still online.

Every attack like this follows the same pattern. Attackers change configurations, reset passwords, and modify project files. Every one of those actions creates a signal on the network before operations degrade. In this most recent case, one victim only noticed ladder logic discrepancies across multiple sites. Catching intrusions shouldn’t depend on a sharp-eyed engineer having a good day. Continuous monitoring of OT environments exists to turn those signals into alerts within minutes instead of days. That difference is the difference between an incident report and a boil-water notice.

Water systems have the least margin for error and, too often, the fewest resources to defend themselves. The FBI and EPA have told us plainly what’s happening and what to do about it. The attackers are betting we won’t follow through. For the third time in three years, they’re testing that bet.

Let’s finally prove them wrong.

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The guidance details steps organizations can take to isolate vital OT and supporting systems, and operate in isolation for an extended period.

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Industry groups who spoke at town halls hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency about a pending cyber incident notification regulation had a few consistent messages:

We want this to apply to fewer of us. We don’t want to report to you on as many incidents. We want to give you less information when we do. 

CISA last week published transcripts from the town halls, where the agency sought feedback on the delayed rule for the 2022 Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act — perhaps the most significant cyber legislation Congress has ever passed. That law required critical infrastructure owners to report major cyberattacks to the federal government within 72 hours, and ransomware payments within 24 hours.

The law was designed to let the feds share information about significant incidents more widely to prepare other would-be victims. CISA published a proposed rule on the law in 2024 to define terms like “covered cyber incident” and more, and industry groups have persistently registered their objections since then.

CISA missed the October 2025 deadline for finalizing the rule, then missed a May reset target date, and now the administration says the rule will be completed in September.

Some industry sources told CyberScoop they consider that unlikely. Most also haven’t received any indications from CISA about how much of the town hall feedback it intends to embrace, they said.

Companies, incidents, information 

Those town hall comments over the course of four June dates were often very direct.

“The rule includes too many companies,” said Grant MacIntyre, director of regulatory affairs and senior attorney at the Auto Care Association. CISA estimated that more than 300,000 entities will be subject to its requirements.

Some industries advocated for their removal entirely, such as two different groups representing elements of the insurance sector. Some sought to reduce the number affected within their sector, such as the Nuclear Energy Institute wanting the list cut down to those already subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission cybersecurity reporting requirements.

While CISA wrote the regulation with the intention to avoid overburdening small businesses, some feared it wouldn’t work that way in practice.

“The current approach where an entity qualifies either by size or by sector effectively negates the intended limitation on small businesses,” said Douglas Leigh, vice president of legislative affairs for the Alliance for Chemical Distribution. “In chemical distribution, even small entities could be swept in under multiple cyber categories.”

Where the rule specifies what kind of data organizations should report in a major incident, CISA should “seek to collect the least amount of information possible in the easiest to report fashion to facilitate information accuracy and reporting speed,” said Samantha Burch, vice president of technology public policy at government affairs at AHIP, a health insurance industry trade association.

Many, for instance, argued the report should not include information on the affected entities’ security measures.

Others worried about what kind of incidents would trigger reporting requirements.

“My big concern is that you’re going to be asking us to report incidents on every time some foreign entity tickles our firewall, whether they do anything or not, if they just do a ping or a search,” said Tim Pospisil, chief security officer for Nebraska Public Power District. “And that could be extremely burdensome.”

Industry Expectations

One industry representative told CyberScoop that CISA’s willingness to hold town halls, combined with the Trump administration strategy emphasizing “common sense regulation,” was a good sign about where the rule might be heading.

‘They are not picking up on the Biden administration’s approach and tweaking it. They’re thinking, ‘What are the specific pieces of information we need during a cyber incident to help critical infrastructure companies respond?’” said Henry Young, senior director of policy for the Business Software Alliance. “In general, industry is optimistic that what we’ll end up with are a few of the most important pieces of information, so that in the emergency, companies can act quickly and actually respond to an incident rather than completing lots of paperwork.”

But multiple industry sources said they haven’t gotten many indications about CISA’s intentions. Nor are they optimistic CISA can meet the September target date in the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.

“It could slip,” one said. “But I think they’re going to try.”

That industry source said they’d like to see a proposal from CISA before it cements anything forever.

Another industry source said it’s hard to trust the September date given past CISA delays, some of which aren’t CISA’s fault, such as dealing with multiple government shutdowns. Some of the delays trace to the Trump administration, given the massive cuts to CISA’s personnel.

Congress is also getting impatient.

The House Appropriations Committee “is concerned about delays in publishing the final CIRCIA rule and urges CISA to finalize it promptly following stakeholder review and feedback,” the panel wrote in the committee report for its fiscal 2027 Department of Homeland Security spending bill.

It’s a much different world than when CISA began writing the rule, something the agency also has to take into account now.

“AI has fundamentally changed the playing field,” the source said. “When this was set up, we didn’t even have the first generation of ChatGPT. We’re now in a mythos class environment.” That’s changed “how quickly we can identify threats, mitigate them, the level of human intervention, potential machine engagement.”

While CISA might have good intentions, past interactions give cause for skepticism about how capable it is of working collaboratively with industry, the source said.

Another industry source said conversations with CISA suggest the agency will look to simplify the regulation to keep it smaller and narrower, then potentially build upon it later.

From CISA’s mouth

Nick Andersen, the acting director of CISA, talked about his overarching intentions with CIRCIA at the town halls.

“CISA does not view CIRCIA as simply a check-the-box compliance exercise,” Andersen said at one. “CIRCIA will enhance visibility into the cyberthreat landscape to enable a robust national early warning capability for critical infrastructure. By quickly reporting covered cyber incidents and ransom payments to CISA, we will be able to provide timely and actionable defensive and eviction measures to your network defenders.”

Asked by CyberScoop about next steps for CIRCIA, and how it might incorporate the industry feedback, a spokesperson provided a statement.

“CISA recognizes the importance of CIRCIA, however, multiple funding lapses impacted CISA’s ability to conduct rulemaking activity for CIRCIA. CISA continues to work on the final rule,” the spokesperson said, adding that 1,200 critical infrastructure stakeholders attended the town halls.  “CISA will continue to communicate updates on the CIRCIA rulemaking process and timeline through CISA.gov/CIRCIA and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.”

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On July 1, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a seven-page notice in the Federal Register that could fundamentally change how the U.S. government works with private companies to protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats and natural disasters.

The notice, “Establishment of the Alliance of National Councils for Homeland Operational Resilience – Critical Infrastructure (ANCHOR-CI),” details a new framework for CISA to build councils that let private partners advise the government on cybersecurity and critical infrastructure issues. This replaces the 20-year framework that the federal government used to work with critical infrastructure partners, formerly known as the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council (CIPAC). For at least the next two years, ANCHOR-CI will dictate how the government and industry collaborate to protect critical infrastructure.

When former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem terminated CIPAC in March of last year, Congress and private-sector partners objected immediately. The damage was real. The 16 sector-coordinating councils (SCCs), that brought together private partners from each critical infrastructure sector lost their legal mechanism to meet with the federal government. They could no longer advise and provide group consensus to their federal counterparts without triggering laws that CIPAC exempted. To be sure, CISA still had the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative. Department of Energy had the Energy Threat Analysis Center. The National Security Agency had the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center. But none, however, replaced what the SCC ’s did: stand as steady forums where industry and government hashed out how to best assist critical infrastructure owners and operators.

Not that the SCCs were flawless. I worked with or alongside SCCs for more than a decade, most recently at CISA, and I am familiar with their shortcomings. SCC membership could be stagnant. The quality of recommendations to the government varied.  New members faced barriers based on each sector’s rules.

The core problem was how the model locked each sector in. DHS built SCCs in an era when critical infrastructure risks were looked at through a sector-specific lens: energy, transportation, water, communications, and so on. Today’s cyber threats jump across these sectors. A vulnerability in a cloud service provider or industrial software platform can harm hospitals, pipelines, manufacturers, water utilities, and financial institutions simultaneously.

To see why ANCHOR-CI works better than the CIPAC structure, we need to go back 20 years and understand what CIPAC was trying to do. Congress didn’t codify CIPAC into law. Instead, Congress authorized DHS to establish advisory committees exempt from the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). This exemption let the federal government and SCCs hold private meetings without public notice, convene quickly without complying with FACA procedural requirements, pick members based on expertise rather than balanced public representation, and skip FACA’s public recordkeeping requirements. (But these FACA exemptions do not exempt records from the Freedom of Information Act, a common misconception.)

ANCHOR-CI carries this power forward. Crucially, ANCHOR-CI end the siloed, sector-by-sector approach by creating four types of councils: Critical Infrastructure Sector Councils; Cross-Sector Councils; Critical Infrastructure Industry Councils; and Regional Coordinating Councils.

Critical Infrastructure Sector Councils: These are basically the old SCCs, but with a change in power.  The CISA director now approves or removes any council member directly.

Cross-Sector Councils: These councils matter most. Specifically, they tackle “current and emerging threats, interdependencies, or other issues impacting multiple critical infrastructure sectors or industries.” Examples might include councils on countering unmanned aerial systems, AI threats, or reducing dependence on foreign supply chains. CISA could also revive and expand the Space Systems Critical Infrastructure Working Group.

Critical Infrastructure Industry Councils: Like cross-sector councils but designed for issues that span sectors in ways that don’t fit neatly into a given sector. After Volt Typhoon—a Chinese campaign that installed malicious malware in critical infrastructure—CISA could establish an Operational Technology council with original equipment manufacturers, software providers, and critical infrastructure owners to address and stop the threat.

Regional Coordinating Councils: CISA says these will help state and local governments tackle regional risks. What that means in practice is unclear. CISA could create 10 councils tied to 10 regional offices. Or it could create councils focused on real regional risks: preparing for the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest, droughts in the Southwest, or hurricane in the South and Mid-Atlantic.

In the end, like any policy, success hinges on how CISA carries it out. If CISA runs ANCHOR-CI thoughtfully and with transparency, it could become the biggest upgrade in of public-private cybersecurity collaboration work in two decades.

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An annual spy policy bill would authorize a cyberthreat intelligence sharing pilot program for state and local governments, and order an outside assessment of how intelligence agencies are currently sharing that information with those jurisdictions.

The House Intelligence Committee approved fiscal 2027 intelligence authorization legislation Monday that also includes provisions on election security and that are meant to boost intelligence community (IC) usage of artificial intelligence for cyber and other purposes.

The measure’s language on state and local information sharing come amid widespread frustration with Trump administration cutbacks on such aid from the federal government, with the president taking explicit action to shift more responsibility for cyber defenses to the local level.

Under the pilot program, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) would pick one state to receive monthly briefings from the ODNI, Department of Homeland Security, FBI and others to receive monthly briefings on “timely, specific, and actionable information regarding cyber threats” in unclassified form. After a year, the ODNI would then provide a report on the viability of a wider briefing program for state and local governments.

The bill requires the ODNI to produce a strategy on information sharing with states and local areas, and would require the Government Accountability Office to conduct an assessment of the state of such sharing now, including a summary of relevant agencies’ current efforts, how the agencies deconflict those efforts and what kind of obstacles security clearances pose to improving information sharing.

Trump’s pick to serve as DNI, Jay Clayton, emphasized his desire to focus on cyber threat information sharing as part of his Senate vetting last week, but some in the GOP are also pushing to significantly reduce the size of his office.

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross has also talked about creating pilot programs for cyber threat information sharing with state and local governments, but there’s been little movement on that initiative.

During committee deliberation, panel Democrats won adoption of a trio of election security amendments.

An amendment from the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, would require the intelligence community to publish an unclassified assessment of foreign intelligence threats to the 2026 midterms. Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado’s amendment would partially withhold funding for the ODNI until Congress gets overdue reports it had required on the 2024 and 2026 elections. And  Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania’s amendment would “protect analysts from retribution by IC leadership for working on intelligence products related to foreign influence in US elections,” according to a news release.

The Democrats’ push arrives shortly after President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address seeking to bolster his long-debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

According to a Republican summary of the bill, it includes provisions for “significantly increasing funding for expanded access and use of frontier AI models for intelligence and cyber missions,” to codify and expand the role of the Artificial Intelligence Security Center at the National Security Agency and strengthen information sharing on AI threats.

“This year’s [bill] balances strong transparency and accountability measures while equipping the IC with the resources needed to combat the ever-evolving threats from our adversaries around the world, with a particularly strong focus on the global AI race,” said House Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford, R-Ark.

Another assessment that the bill orders would come from the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence of the Department of Energy on foreign cyberthreats to critical energy infrastructure, including their intent and risks.

The trend in Congress is for lawmakers to incorporate the annual intelligence authorization bill, or some of its provisions, into the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which often reaches the president’s desk at the end of each calendar year.

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Independently judged and sponsor-neutral, the new awards program honors the people, organizations, and technologies delivering proven impact in industrial cybersecurity; winners to be announced live at the 2026 ICS Cybersecurity Conference in Nashville

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The new program stems from an AI-focused Executive Order signed by President Trump on June 2.

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The Trump administration unveiled its new federal clearinghouse for sharing AI cyber threat information between the government and private sector, and said the project is already receiving threat intelligence on cybersecurity vulnerabilities and prioritizing patching.

Created last month through a White House executive order, “Gold Eagle” will be managed by the Department of the Treasury, with contributions from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Defense, as well as open-source software providers, critical infrastructure operators and industry.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Treasury Department is working hand in hand with the private sector to safeguard our financial institutions, close vulnerabilities, and protect the integrity of the U.S. financial system,” Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Treasury, along with our partner agencies, will continue to harness frontier AI capabilities to stay ahead of our adversaries and defend the American people from emerging threats.”

Gold Eagle is meant to help both public and private organizations find, fix and patch vulnerabilities found using AI tools before they’re discovered and exploited by bad actors. The work will involve using AI to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities in victim systems and software, and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said it would also further explore ways for the technology to be leveraged for cyber defense.

A senior White House official told reporters on a background call that closed source models from frontier AI models, including Anthropic’s Mythos, will be used to discover vulnerabilities.

White House officials said they worked with the Software Engineering Institute, SEI at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a new platform, the Vulnerability Information and Coordination Environment – or VINTS – to receive third-party reports on AI-discovered vulnerabilities. According to the White House, the system has already begun collecting intelligence on vulnerabilities and prioritizing patches.

“I think on the early side of this, we have seen that the scale of vulnerability discovery, particularly with users of new technology to scan their system, is something that is a step function change [than] we’ve seen seen before,” the official said.

As AI models have improved at carrying out core cybersecurity-related tasks – like scanning code for vulnerabilities or developing proof-of-concept exploit code – cybersecurity experts and policymakers have become increasingly worried. The modern internet is rife with insecure code, misconfigurations and other mistakes that can be identified and exploited faster than ever before using AI tools.

Vulnerabilities in open-source software can be both widespread and hidden, as many commercial software products on the market rely on open-source code but few bother to document it. When hackers compromised a logging tool in the Log4J open-source Apache software library in 2021, it required a massive, multi-month coordination effort by CISA, the private sector and other stakeholders to find and fix affected pieces of software.

The White House official said the work of Gold Eagle is reflective of the administration’s “full support” of U.S. open-source software providers and maintainers.

Open source tools are “vital to systems that run throughout our country and daily life,” a senior administration official said, speaking to reporters on background. “It is being maintained by a talented group of people and entities and we will do everything we can to support the strength of that community.”

Michael Daniel, former White House cyber coordinator under President Barack Obama, told CyberScoop that AI is still so new that policymakers continue to observe its impact and adapt. While some existing communication channels for sharing cybersecurity threat information could probably be duplicated for tracking AI threats, there is still much for policymakers to learn more about the technology, the kind of threats it produces and its ecosystem of stakeholders.

“It may turn out at the end of the day that phishing is still phishing, and the fact that now you’ve got AI tools doing it, it’s still phishing. Or there may be something fundamentally different about it that we need to figure out how to combat and share information around,” he said.

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Multiple state-sponsored APTs are compromising poorly secured devices across critical infrastructure sector networks.

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The AI-focused executive order President Donald Trump signed last month gave the Treasury Department, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) 30 days to establish a new “AI cybersecurity clearinghouse.” The deadline passed last week.

The clearinghouse is meant to coordinate the scanning, discovery, and validation of software vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, and then prioritize how those vulnerabilities get patched and distributed.

It’s the right problem to solve. The question now is whether what is created will actually solve it.

The risk is that urgency produces something that looks like a clearinghouse, but functions like a committee: collecting information, convening meetings, and then stalling when it gets to the hard part.

Going beyond bug discovery is mission critical

It’s counterintuitive at a moment when AI-assisted vulnerability discovery is advancing rapidly, but the hard part is no longer just finding bugs. Those of us working at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity know where the real bottleneck is. HackerOne has seen it firsthand as a launch partner in Patch the Planet, OpenAI‘s initiative to use AI to find and fix vulnerabilities in critical open-source software at internet scale. The lesson underpinning that work, and informed by more than a decade of running vulnerability disclosure programs, is consistent: AI tools can surface vulnerabilities faster than anyone can act on them. What lags behind is everything that comes after discovery: deciding which findings are real, assessing severity in context, writing and testing a fix, and getting a patch accepted and deployed by the people responsible for maintaining the affected code.

Experienced human reviewers frequently disagree with AI-assigned severity ratings, because a model cannot see a project’s threat model or operational context. Software providers, especially the many volunteer open-source maintainers that so much of today’s digital infrastructure rely upon, face a relentless queue: verify the claim, assess the importance, write the patch, coordinate disclosure. AI has accelerated the incoming volume without yet equally accelerating our people and processes’ capacity to manage it. Better bug-finding tools mean you find more bugs. The improvements that really matter are the ones that help defenders push patches out and get them deployed faster.

That lesson should sit at the center of how the clearinghouse is designed.

If the clearinghouse focuses primarily on scanning coordination, which the executive order’s text emphasizes, it risks widening that gap rather than closing it. A body that finds more vulnerabilities but cannot move them to resolution is not a security win. At national scale, it is a backlog generator.

Laying a foundation for success

The administration can get this right, but it requires building the correct infrastructure now, not layering it on later.

The clearinghouse needs to do more than coordinate scanning. It needs to actually triage the results. Its core job should be filtering reports to identify which findings are truly credible, exploitable, and consequential for critical infrastructure. Using shared validation standards and risk-based prioritization, it can determine what warrants a national response. Otherwise, it’s just automating bigger backlogs.

Second, the clearinghouse also needs to tackle something more fundamental. Defenders don’t have the resources to respond to what gets reported. Vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure often live in open-source code maintained by small teams or individuals with no formal obligation to respond to disclosures and limited capacity to act quickly. The clearinghouse should work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop guidelines for open-source maintainers on structuring repositories and workflows to speed up patch review and deployment.

These guidelines should include how to use AI-assisted patching and clarify what downstream consumers of open-source code should do to help maintainers address vulnerabilities.  Federal policy should create incentives for downstream users to share responsibility for remediation through funding, engineering support, AI-assisted patch development, and procurement requirements that reward participation in coordinated vulnerability response.

Third, the clearinghouse should treat software bills of materials (SBOMs), the structured inventories of the components that make up a software product, as foundational infrastructure. SBOMs are what make it possible to trace where a vulnerable component lives across the supply chain. Without them, validated findings won’t be fixed fast enough at scale.

Finally, the clearinghouse should measure success based on what is fixed, not based on what is discovered.  Agencies need to publish data on validation rates, time-to-patch, adoption of fixes, and recurring classes of vulnerabilities. These metrics help AI systems, software vendors, and policymakers to continuously improve how vulnerabilities are addressed.

Most importantly: the agencies standing up this clearinghouse should resist the temptation to build its operational model from scratch. The private sector and the open-source security community have years of experience running exactly the kind of vulnerability intake, triage, and coordinated disclosure workflows the clearinghouse needs. The executive order wisely calls for voluntary collaboration with industry. That collaboration should be structural, not advisory, embedded in how the clearinghouse operates from the start, not bolted on after the architecture is already set.

The clearinghouse can work. But the challenge is no longer finding vulnerabilities. It is building a system that can turn discoveries into action. That is how its success should be measured.

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The Department of Homeland Security is bringing back a key cybersecurity information sharing effort with critical infrastructure, more than a year after the Trump administration shuttered an existing nerve center between government and private sector.

The Alliance of National Councils for Homeland Operational Resilience – Critical Infrastructure program, first reported by CyberScoop in January, is meant to replace the function of the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council.

CIPAC was a federal advisory body that allowed agencies like the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the intelligence community to interact with key owners and operators of water, power, internet and telecommunications to coordinate on cyberattacks and digital vulnerabilities.

ANCHOR will fulfill a similar role.

“ANCHOR-CI will provide forums through which cybersecurity, law enforcement, intelligence, national security, and other government representatives at the federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial levels may engage representatives of private sector entities and critical infrastructure owners and operators in reviewing the current threat environment, discussing potential vulnerabilities, and forming recommendations on securing a more resilient critical infrastructure and cyberspace,” DHS wrote in a federal register notice set to publish July 1.

ANCHOR-CI will be managed by CISA, which will appoint members to the council from industry, trade associations, state and local governments and other sources.

The body will consist of four types of different councils: one focused on federally designated critical infrastructure sectors, cross-sector councils to deal with emerging threats like cyber attacks or zero-day vulnerabilities, critical infrastructure industry councils and regional coordinating councils.

As CyberScoop reported, a key difference between CIPAC and ANCHOR-CI will be the way key meetings will be exempt from public transparency laws.

“In recognition of the sensitive nature of the subject matter involved regarding the assessment and mitigation of security and operational risks through whole-of government coordination, and strong partnership with the private sector that is required to ensure the security and resilience of critical infrastructure, the Secretary hereby exempts ANCHOR-CI from The Federal Advisory Committee Act,” the notice states.

The disbanding of CIPAC under then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was part of a larger dismantling of DHS advisory bodies set up under previous presidential regimes. Critical infrastructure owners and operators felt blindsided by the move and many found themselves without access to the kind of federally-enabled threat intelligence and cybersecurity support that had become a staple of U.S. cyber defense over the past decade.

A source told CyberScoop that new Secretary Markwayne Mullin was sympathetic to concerns from critical infrastructure owners and operators that they felt abandoned by DHS under Noem’s leadership, and was determined to make efforts to repair that relationship.

The restoration of information sharing services under ANCHOR-AI is one part of that effort.

Representative Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, called ANCHOR “a welcome step” toward strengthening operational partnerships between industry and CISA at a time when China and other adversaries are using AI and other tools to target U.S. critical infrastructure.

“The abrupt elimination of CIPAC last year caused unnecessary confusion and strain in these coordination efforts, and I appreciate Secretary Mullin prioritizing this partnership moving forward and for recognizing the importance of rebuilding CISA’s cybersecurity workforce,” said Garbarino in a statement to CyberScoop.

According to a former CISA official, ANCHOR-CI gives the CISA director more authority over the makeup and direction of the organization than under CIPAC.

Bob Kolasky, who ran the National Risk Management Agency at CISA, said the new organizational structure for ANCHOR “really puts CISA  in the position of having authority over who participates,” a change from CIPAC, when the private sector and other sector risk management agencies were given autonomy to choose their representatives.

“Previous iterations of CIPAC and the way it was operationalized leaned heavily on the idea that private sector coordinating councils were self-governed and self-organized, and the DHS Secretary and the CISA Director…managed the overall partnership structure,” said Kolasky, now senior vice president of critical infrastructure at Exiger. “They were not given the authority to make decisions on who would participate in that partnership structure.”

Under previous administrations, CISA officials frequently partnered with industry to build trusted lines of communication and work on cross sectoral cybersecurity initiatives. Most of these efforts were voluntary – a reflection of the agency’s limited regulatory mandate but also of CISA’s view that they were the nation’s risk advisor, not its manager.

Kolasky said some there remain unanswered questions from the information released so far in the Federal Register notice, including how the CISA director would choose representatives and what role other sector risk management agencies would play influencing ANCHOR. He said “what is important is consistent processes” that ensure membership isn’t dependent on being in the good graces of a particular agency or administration.

“I want it to be a partnership structure between industry and government and not something that is completely operated and mandated by the government,” said Kolasky.

The post DHS to unveil replacement council for critical infrastructure cybersecurity appeared first on CyberScoop.

Post-quantum cryptography didn’t sneak up on the industry. 

For years, security teams, standards bodies, hyperscalers, and governments have been pointing at the same horizon: a cryptographically relevant quantum computer will, eventually, dismantle the public-key algorithms underpinning today’s enterprise security. The latest executive order doesn’t introduce a new threat. It codifies what the field has long understood, and attaches deadlines to it.

For CISOs, the framing shift matters. PQC is fundamentally a readiness problem, not a cryptography problem. Watching Google accelerate its quantum roadmap, or seeing federal agencies restructure their security architecture around PQC, makes the stakes impossible to ignore.” Boards are already asking: “How are we thinking about post-quantum transition today?” For most organizations, the gap between that question and a credible answer is wider than it should be.

The EO is unambiguous on scope. PQC has moved from a research effort to real policy, with deadlines, accountability structures, and direct consequences for federal agencies, contractors, critical infrastructure operators, and the broader private sector that supports them.

Federal high-value systems must transition key establishment to PQC by Dec. 31, 2030. Digital signatures will follow by Dec. 31, 2031.

Those dates may appear distant, but for anyone who has navigated an enterprise-scale security transformation, with the procurement cycles, architecture reviews, and organizational change management that entails, 2030 sits squarely inside current planning horizons. The window for orderly execution is already narrowing.

What makes that window even tighter is that the most immediate risk has nothing to do with deadlines. “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” attacks are already operational. Nation-state adversaries are collecting encrypted data today and storing it until quantum capabilities are sufficient to decrypt it: intellectual property, health records, financial transactions, source code, government communications, and more. The encryption protecting that data right now is, functionally, a time-delayed vulnerability. Long-lived sensitive data may already be compromised in ways that won’t become visible for years.

The first step for CISOs is shifting from awareness to ownership.

PQC readiness cannot be delegated to individual application teams or treated as a future compliance checkbox. That approach will not survive given the EO’s accountability requirements. Every organization needs a point person: a program lead, a cross-functional steering committee, or a dedicated cryptographic risk office. Whatever the structure, it needs authority and a seat at the leadership table.

That ownership must span security, IT, infrastructure, engineering, product, legal, compliance, procurement, and business stakeholders. Cryptography is embedded across the entire enterprise: certificates, keys, protocols, APIs, hardware, cloud services, code-signing systems, identity infrastructure, third-party platforms. No single team has the bandwidth to address this alone. A cross-functional working group or Center of Excellence should be an organizational prerequisite as we move into the future.

Visibility is going to be critical, and this is where most organizations will find the largest gaps.

CISOs need a clear picture of where cryptography exists across their environment: which algorithms are in use, which systems depend on vulnerable cryptography, what data requires long-term confidentiality, and which business processes would be disrupted by migration. Without that inventory, risk assessment is guesswork, remediation is impossible, and demonstrating progress to regulators or boards becomes an exercise in speculation.

The principle is straightforward: you cannot protect what you cannot see.

Furthermore, a cryptographic inventory cannot be a static spreadsheet updated annually and then filed away. It needs to function as a living view of the organization’s trust infrastructure, covering certificates, keys, algorithms, libraries, protocols, signing systems, certificate authorities, HSMs, workloads, devices, and third-party dependencies. 

Once that visibility exists, prioritization follows from business impact. Systems protecting long-lived sensitive data, critical infrastructure, customer trust, software integrity, and regulated environments move first, with everything else sequenced accordingly.

Beyond visibility, CISOs need a roadmap aligned to the order’s milestones rather than aspirational planning documents that never translate into funded programs.

The 2030 key establishment deadline requires understanding every point where encryption and key exchange mechanisms operate across critical systems. The 2031 digital signatures deadline extends that challenge to software integrity, code signing, document signing, authentication, identity infrastructure, and long-term verification. This is a multi-year transformation program, and it warrants the same organizational rigor as any other enterprise-wide initiative of comparable scope.

That means three categories of dedicated resources. First, funding: PQC readiness cannot be absorbed into existing security budgets without displacing other priorities. It requires multi-year investment in discovery tooling, testing, migration execution, automation, and governance. Second, talent: organizations need cryptography expertise, enterprise architecture capability, PKI experience, risk management, compliance support, and program leadership, a combination already in short supply across the industry. Third, technology: discovery tools, certificate and key lifecycle automation, policy enforcement, reporting infrastructure, and the architectural capability for crypto-agility.

Crypto-agility is the long-term objective that makes this transition worth doing properly.

Organizations that treat PQC as a one-time algorithm swap will find themselves back in the same position when standards shift again. The quantum transition is occurring in parallel with the rise of AI, machine identities, autonomous systems, and increasingly complex digital ecosystems, all of which depend on cryptographic trust. Organizations that do not actively govern that trust infrastructure will struggle with AI security, software supply chain integrity, identity governance, and the compliance mandates that follow.

The order functions as a forcing mechanism, converting PQC from a future technical concern into a present-day leadership accountability. Three questions now define where an organization stands:

• Do we have a clear picture of where our cryptographic risk lives?
• Do we have a funded, sequenced migration plan that meets the order’s deadlines?
• Can we demonstrate that our trust infrastructure is agile enough to adapt as standards and threats continue to evolve?

The debate over precisely when quantum computing will be a reality is a distraction. Building the visibility, governance, funding, and automation required to move with confidence is where we need to be spending our collective time and effort.

CISOs have moved past the question of whether to act. The operative question is how far behind the organization already is, and how quickly it can transform cryptography from an invisible dependency into a managed, measurable, and adaptive system of trust. The organizations that begin that work now will be the ones with options when the deadlines arrive.

The post What the post-quantum executive order really demands of CISOs appeared first on CyberScoop.

Accenture announced Thursday it would acquire a majority stake in industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos for $3.25 billion and purchase two smaller security companies outright, essentially making a $4.18 billion bet that defending the IT networks of power grids, pipelines, factories and critical infrastructure sectors will become one of the defining challenges of the AI era.

The deals — which also include two Austin, Texas-based companies, runZero and NetRise —  represent a significant strategic pivot for Accenture toward operational technology (OT) security,  a segment of the cybersecurity market that has long been underfunded relative to traditional IT defenses. The announcement comes as the consulting giant faces pressure on its core business from the same AI tools reshaping the threat environment it is now moving to address.

Dragos, founded in 2016 by former intelligence specialists and based in Hanover, Maryland, has built what the industry regards as a leader detecting threats in OT environments. Its proprietary dataset of industrial threat intelligence has made it a trusted partner to critical infrastructure operators globally.

RunZero specializes in asset discovery and attack-surface intelligence — essentially mapping what is connected to a network and identifying where it is exposed. NetRise focuses on firmware-level visibility and software supply chain security, areas that have drawn increased scrutiny since high-profile incidents revealed how deeply embedded vulnerabilities can propagate through industrial device ecosystems.

Dragos co-founder and CEO Robert M. Lee will continue leading the combined entity, which will operate as an independent business under Accenture’s ownership. The CEOs of runZero and NetRise, HD Moore and Tom Pace, respectively, along with NetRise’s chief technology officer Michael Scott, will join Dragos as senior executives.

The acquisitions are not Accenture’s first move in OT security. The company acquired Cimation in 2015 and Revolutionary Security in 2020, along with several other OT-focused firms. 

Thursday’s deal, however, is of a different scale and ambition. Where previous acquisitions built out Accenture’s services capabilities, the addition of Dragos, runZero and NetRise moves the company firmly into OT cybersecurity software, a market it had not previously entered at scale.

Accenture and Dragos describe this expanding environment — which also encompasses Internet of Things devices, cloud-connected sensors and related IT infrastructure — as “xOT.” The concern is that as AI is integrated into industrial decision-making, the attack surface grows. At the same time, adversaries are using AI to shorten the window between compromising an IT network and pivoting to OT systems underneath it.

Despite that convergence, most cybersecurity budgets remain concentrated on traditional IT, leaving critical infrastructure comparatively exposed. The OT cybersecurity services market is estimated at roughly $7 billion in 2026. The broader OT cybersecurity market, which includes software, is estimated at $27 billion this year and projected to reach nearly $59 billion by 2031, growing at approximately 16% annually.

“Our energy and water systems, manufacturing plants, data centers and other operational environments need cybersecurity built from the ground up for xOT and designed to keep pace as threats evolve. The consequences of getting it wrong become societal threats,” Lee said in a release. “Organizations need solutions, not a patchwork of software and services. The addition of runZero and NetRise will allow the Dragos Platform to be a unique end-to-end platform for global defense, and Accenture will bring its decades of trusted relationships and deep expertise to help us scale and secure more critical infrastructure and physical operations globally.”

The transactions are expected to close in August or September, pending customary regulatory approvals.

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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency wants to fundamentally reevaluate how it prioritizes risks and vulnerabilities, both for privately-owned critical infrastructure and within the federal government, acting director Nick Andersen said Tuesday.

The plans include a binding operational directive for federal agencies set to be published Wednesday and getting more specific with critical infrastructure owners and operators about which assets they need to protect most and how, Andersen said while speaking at an event hosted by Axonius in Washington, D.C. and talking with reporters afterwards.

The binding operational directive looks to revise how federal agencies do vulnerability management, he said. “Overall, our approach to date has been ‘A patch is released, apply this patch as quickly as you can,’” he said.

“We’re really asking people to take more of a focus on risk associated with each vulnerability. Is it with an asset that is internet-exposed? Does it align to a KEV entry?” he said, referring to CISA’s list of known exploited vulnerabilities. “Is it automatable in its exploitation? Really, we need to be able to highlight that some patches just aren’t as important as others, and plugging the holes for some vulnerabilities is simply not as important as others.”

Andersen said he has made setting the right priorities the focus of his tenure.

“We have to be okay with saying there are some systems that are less important than others, there are some elements of critical infrastructure that are less important than others,” he said. “Those things are very easy for us to rationalize [for] physical crises, but we need to start wrapping our minds around how we’re going to do that during cyber crises.”

Andersen said artificial intelligence-enhanced threats have fueled the directive in part, based on “a recognition that we’re a different dynamic environment with the shorter timeline to weaponization and exploitation,” but the discussions on the directive have been going on for months, before the splashy announcements about frontier AI models and the risks they might deepen. Wednesday’s directive is unrelated to the AI-focused executive order released by the Trump administration last week.

The idea of prioritizing certain potential hacking targets over others isn’t a new one in critical infrastructure, with concepts like “Section 9” designations under a 2013 executive order for entities whom an attack upon could have catastrophic effects; “systemically important critical infrastructure” designations, as recommended by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission; or the creation of the National Risk Management Center established during President Donald Trump’s first term but now the subject of proposed budget cuts.

Andersen said past concepts haven’t worked well, citing Section 9 designations as an example.

“We would sit here and say, ‘Congratulations, you’re with this company, and you’re a Section 9 entity, isn’t that fantastic?’” he said. “That’s really not the level of fidelity that we have to be able to get to to have a real measurable conversation about risk. I need to be able to go to a company and say, ‘Here’s the specific function you’re supporting that makes you more critical. Let’s have a conversation about the specific assets that support that function, and how do we get to a measurable level of resilience for those assets?’”

Those discussions need to get down to a “fine grain,” Andersen said.

“If I’ve got a major bank that I’m talking to, is it as important to me that the bank’s process that supports the bulk payment system is resilient, or is it just as important to me that the branch location two blocks away is continuing to operate?” he said. “Those things just are apples and oranges, even though it’s the same entity that might be affected.”

CISA’s capabilities under the Trump administration have drawn considerable scrutiny, given deep budget cuts at the agency, with more planned. The administration is now making moves to hire back personnel.

Andersen said the agency is working to hire 329 people, and will have job offers out to 182 of them by the end of June. He said the emphasis of the first tranche of hires under the hiring sprint is operational capabilities, meaning areas like emergency communications, infrastructure security and regional personnel.

The agency also has had some of its work hampered by the government shutdowns, such as the delay in plans for town-hall meetings about implementation of the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022, which will require key owners and operators to report major incidents within 72 hours.

Andersen said he couldn’t set a date for finalization of regulations related to the law — which had already been delayed prior to any funding lapses — with those town halls now scheduled to begin next week.

“We could have a lot of comments that come to us and really radically change our way of thinking about what the need is here,” he said. “But our focus is just on what’s the original congressional intent behind CIRCIA. what is the greatest need that we’re going to be able to serve, and how it’s going to be able to further the mission that we have for the nation.”

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Anthropic is broadening access to its Project Glasswing program, adding approximately 150 organizations in 15 countries, the company announced Tuesday, as its restricted Claude Mythos Preview model has already surfaced more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity software vulnerabilities since the program launched in early April.

The expansion follows an initial cohort of roughly 50 partners that were announced when Anthropic first unveiled the initiative. Those members included technology companies such as Amazon Web Services, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, among others.  

According to the announcement, the new group covers sectors that were underrepresented in the first wave, including power, water, healthcare, communications, and hardware. Many of the new partners are vendors whose codebases underpin critical infrastructure systems.

The company did not give any further details on what companies or organizations were part of the new cohort.  Sources tell CyberScoop that NetSkope and Rubrik, which specialize in cloud security and data management, is part of the group given access in this latest round.

The scale of what Mythos Preview has already found is drawing attention across the security industry. Cloudflare identified 2,000 bugs across its critical-path systems, including 400 rated high or critical, with a false-positive rate the company described as better than that of human testers. Mozilla found and fixed 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox 150 while testing the model, more than 10 times the number found in a previous Firefox version using an earlier Anthropic model. Several other partners reported that their rates of bug discovery increased more than tenfold after deploying the model. 

Anthropic also used Mythos to scan more than 1,000 open-source projects, flagging 23,019 potential vulnerabilities, 6,202 of them estimated as high or critical. Of 1,752 high- or critical-rated findings independently reviewed, over 90% were confirmed as valid. 

The findings have shifted what Anthropic describes as the central issue in cybersecurity. Despite the enhanced ability to discover flaws, the company admits there are challenges with verifying, disclosing, and patching them before attackers can take advantage.

“The bottleneck in fixing bugs like these is the human capacity to triage, report, and design and deploy patches for them,” the company said in its blog post. 

That bottleneck has broader implications. A joint report from the Cloud Security Alliance, the SANS Institute, and OWASP concluded that organizations are “likely to be overwhelmed” in the near term by threat actors using AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster than defenders can patch them.

Anthropic has said it will not release Mythos-class models to the general public, citing the absence of safeguards sufficient to prevent serious misuse. In the interim, it has released Claude Security, a product using its publicly available Claude Opus 4.8 model that has been used to patch more than 2,100 vulnerabilities in three weeks. 

The program’s expansion comes as the Trump administration signed a scaled-back executive order on AI security. The order, which was signed hours after Anthropic’s announcement, sets up a voluntary framework requiring AI developers to submit advanced models to a government review up 30 days before public release.

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Two cybersecurity-focused members of Congress agreed Thursday that reductions to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have done too much damage to an agency essential to defending civilian networks against foreign adversaries.

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., spoke during a panel at the National Cyber Innovation Forum. Despite representing different parties, and serving on different congressional committees, the two lawmakers offered closely aligned assessments of CISA’s role and the consequences of recent cuts.

Bacon, who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation, framed the agency as central to protecting domestic networks. 

“What we really need is a strong CISA that helps protect our domestic networks, our energy grids and things like that,” he said, before adding that “unfortunately” the administration had moved in the opposite direction over the past year. 

He said officials had not appreciated the agency’s defensive value, telling the audience he did not think they recognized the “one-for-one output” CISA provides.

Walkinshaw, who is a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, echoed that view and tied it directly to the threat picture. 

Referring to Chinese-linked intrusion campaigns like Salt Typhoon, he said the United States is contending with adversaries “getting into critical infrastructure overseas and coming after big parts of our critical infrastructure industry here at home.” He said CISA’s information-sharing function and its relationships with utilities and local governments are part of what makes a centralized civilian defense workable.

Both lawmakers placed their concern in the context of a threat environment they described as escalating. Bacon ranked China as the leading cyber adversary to the United States, surpassing Russia, and said intrusions lay groundwork for further actions. “They’re in our energy grid,” he said. “On Day 1 of the war, they want to turn off our energy.” 

The case for a well-resourced CISA, the two lawmakers said, rests on the fact that most of the entities targeted by foreign actors cannot defend themselves on their own. Walkinshaw drew on his work during his time as a county supervisor in Fairfax County, Va., where he worked with Fairfax Water. He said that even as that utility was “one of the most sophisticated, well-funded water authorities in the country,” it struggled to keep pace with the volume and sophistication of attacks. Smaller utilities, towns and businesses, he said, have no realistic path to defending themselves against a nation-state.

Bacon agreed. He said small companies are “the heart of American innovation” but cannot be expected to stand up to adversaries operating with the resources of China, Russia, Iran or North Korea without federal support.

President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget would cut CISA by $707 million, according to a summary released last month, though a separate budget document points to a smaller reduction of $361 million. Either figure would leave the agency with slightly more than $2 billion in discretionary funding, down from the roughly $3 billion it had at the start of the administration.

It has been a turbulent time for CISA during the second Trump administration, in which the agency lost roughly a third of its personnel, shuttered entire divisions and operated without a Senate-confirmed director. Former officials, industry partners and lawmakers from both parties have described diminished coordination with state and local governments, weakened relationships with the private sector and growing concern about whether the agency retains the capacity to manage a major cyber crisis. 

In the model both lawmakers endorsed, they pushed for CISA to play more of a role after an intrusion, helping affected entities restore their networks while the FBI works to identify the source. Walkinshaw said advanced artificial intelligence expands the attack surface and makes that kind of centralized support more important.

 “The advanced AI technology means that more and smaller, maybe not as well-funded organizations across the globe, can launch sophisticated attacks,” he said, adding that the result is that “the defense” becomes “more complex.”

Looking ahead, Walkinshaw said restoring CISA’s capacity should be within reach of a divided Congress. 

“In terms of bipartisan areas of agreement here in Congress, restoring and expanding those capabilities and those partnerships right now should be a top priority,” he said.

The post Lawmakers from both parties say CISA cuts have gone too far appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is urging critical infrastructure owners and operators to plan for delivering essential services under emergency conditions – potentially for months at a time.

The federal government’s top cybersecurity agency warned that state-sponsored hackers, particularly two Chinese groups known as Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, continue to threaten critical sectors like electricity, water, and internet. 

The agency is now working with the private sector to protect operational technology – the systems that control the heavy machinery and equipment that powers most critical infrastructure – from attacks that enter through business IT systems or third-party vendor products.

The initiative  — known as CI Fortify – will include CISA conducting targeted technical assessments of critical infrastructure entities and aims to create plans that “allow for safe operations for weeks to months while isolated” from IT networks and third-party tools, according to the agency’s website.

Nick Andersen, CISA’s acting director, told reporters that the goal is “service delivery [that] can still reach critical infrastructure after the asset owner has disconnected with IT and OT, disconnected from third party vendors and service provider connections and disconnected from third party telecommunications equipment.”

Over the past two years, wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and elsewhere have seen water plants, power substations, data centers and other critical infrastructure targeted by kinetic or cyberattacks.

Andersen said the agency has already begun engaging with some companies to pilot the assessments and expects that work to ramp up considerably as CISA hires additional staff in the coming months.

He declined to name the entities involved in the pilot program, but said they will focus on organizations that support national security, defense, public health and safety and economic continuity. He added that CISA’s assessments will vary from sector to sector depending on their unique needs.

“Water isn’t necessarily designed to prioritize specific customer needs outside of recovery periods, while energy and transportation have more immediate tradeoffs for selecting one load or one set of cargo over another,” Andersen said as an example.

One pillar of CISA’s strategy is isolation: essentially turning off all third-party and business network connections to an OT network when facing an emergency or unknown vulnerability.

Organizations also need to develop an internal plan for what acceptable service levels look like under those conditions and reach understandings with their critical customers, like U.S. military installations and lifeline services.

The second pillar, recovery, involves best practices for organizations: backing up files, documenting systems and having manual backups for operations when normal computer systems are down.

In conversations with cybersecurity specialists who focus on critical infrastructure and operational technology, it is widely assumed that China is not the only nation to have broadly compromised Americans critical infrastructure. That hacking groups tied to other nations have almost surely noticed and exploited the same basic vulnerabilities and hygiene issues found by the Typhoons.

Agencies like the FBI and Federal Communications Commission have touted efforts to purge Chinese hackers and work voluntarily with telecoms to harden their network security. But U.S. national security officials and cybersecurity defenders have consistently said both Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon remain active threats to U.S. critical infrastructure.

The post CISA wants critical infrastructure to operate ‘weeks to months’ in isolation during conflict appeared first on CyberScoop.

Missile and drone attacks that took out cloud data centers in the Middle East underscored a critical vulnerability in the modern economy: reliance on digital infrastructure that sustains competitive advantage and operational continuity for corporations, nations, and militaries. 

The outages and downstream disruption were a preview of a new form of strategic and operational risk. Data centers have long been the backbone of the digital economy. What is changing is the scale of dependence as AI workloads dramatically increase the compute power required to run businesses, supply chains, and national security systems. 

Artificial intelligence has moved beyond business applications and into the core of warfare and national security. Last month, The New York Times reported that AI is “totally integrated” into the collection of intelligence and its use in strategic decision-making and military operations. Even if AI models are not directly firing weapons, AI-enabled analysis now plays a central role in how modern militaries gain visibility, find insights, and drive action.

That matters because it changes what should be considered critical infrastructure. If AI is a competitive advantage for companies and a battlefield advantage for warfighters, then the infrastructure that trains, hosts and runs AI becomes a high-value target. Attacks on the digital infrastructure organizations rely on can do more than inflict financial damage. They can slow decision-making, degrade logistics and reduce military effectiveness without ever engaging a conventional force.

Historically, nation-state campaigns targeting data centers and service providers focused on cyber intrusions for espionage or pre-positioning. What is different now is the emergence of physical attacks on digital infrastructure during active conflict. Russian military intelligence has been linked to campaigns aimed at digital infrastructure and managed services, often as part of a supply chain attack to compromise organizations at scale. Iran-aligned groups have repeatedly demonstrated willingness to target private sector entities to advance geopolitical goals. In many cases, the objective was access: steal data, implant persistence, map networks, and maintain a foothold that could be used later for espionage or disruption. 

What’s clearer now than ever before is that data centers and the AI workloads they support have become so vital to modern society, our adversaries will seek to degrade or destroy their efficacy as a tactic of both kinetic and cyber warfare.

We have already seen how quickly a digital incident can become real-world disruption. On March 11, reports surfaced of thousands of servers and endpoints wiped inside Stryker, a U.S.-based medical device manufacturer. A hacktivist group sympathetic to Iran, known as Handala, claimed responsibility. The incident reportedly halted Stryker’s global production after attackers accessed its Microsoft environment and issued a wipe command via Intune. Even without a single missile, the outcome looked like a strategic disruption: operations stopped and downstream customers felt it.

For business leaders, the imperative is clear: treat operational resilience as a board-level priority in the AI era.

In the world of corporate IT, cybersecurity prioritizes confidentiality: preventing theft of sensitive information. Resilience is a different discipline. It is the ability to sustain operations when systems are degraded, disrupted or actively under attack. For data centers and the businesses that depend on them, resilience comes down to preventing cascading failures and reducing the consequence when something inevitably goes wrong.

These developments carry an important implication for the private sector. Digital infrastructure is increasingly a strategic target, making resilience a core business priority rather than a narrow IT issue. For business leaders, the impact of data center disruption extends into multiple, often overlooked areas of cybersecurity risk.

For example, AI’s growth is colliding with a power wall in many regions where grid capacity cannot scale fast enough. That is driving facilities toward new power dependencies, including on-site generation through distributed energy and renewables, yielding more complex power management environments. This power infrastructure becomes a pressure point as interruptions to power supply or management systems can quickly force a data center offline. Russia has on several occasions demonstrated the ability to target and disrupt power generation and distribution in Ukraine in both 2015 and 2016.

Building management and automation systems, including HVAC and physical access controls, are another. These systems are essential to creating safe and supporting operational environments, but they typically have long capital depreciation cycles and inconsistent security safeguards. Frequently exposed to the Internet, and commonly misconfigured and not properly secured, they can become a pathway to outages by an attacker.

With an increasing density of computing infrastructure, thermal management has become a core environment control in data centers. As the industry adopts liquid cooling for dense AI loads, interference with cooling is no longer a niche technical issue. It is a risk vector that can cause downtime and potential equipment damage if breached by attackers.

Remote access creates another major exposure. Data centers rely on vendors, contractors, and systems integrators for maintenance, monitoring, and support, and each remote connection can become an entry point if it isn’t tightly controlled, centrally managed, and well secured. Adversaries often target these trusted access routes because they can be easier to compromise than a well-defended perimeter, allowing attackers to bypass standard controls and safeguards.

All of this has broader economic implications because data center disruption does not stay inside the technology sector. It cascades into the industries that keep society functioning and supply chains moving: hospitals, electric utilities, chemical production, food and beverage, oil and gas, and transportation. An extended outage becomes missed shipments, halted production, delayed care, safety concerns and lost trust.

What should leaders do now?

Start by defining resilience targets that match business reality: what must stay running, what can degrade, what cannot fail. Then invest in the controls that limit the impact of an incident. Segmentation between IT and OT assets should be non-negotiable. Remote access should be treated as a critical risk pathway with least privilege, strong authentication and continuous monitoring.

Manage facilities systems such as building management systems, power, and cooling controls as critical operational technology, with asset inventories, vulnerability management, logging, and incident response plans that anticipate disruption.

Finally, train to operate under degraded conditions. Tabletop exercises should include scenarios like loss of a cloud region, partial failure of a facility, or compromise of a management plane. Use these exercises to validate that the organization can maintain essential operations and recover quickly when disruptions occur. 

Policy is moving in this direction as well. Governments are increasingly treating data centers as critical infrastructure. Policies and frameworks such as the National Cybersecurity Strategy, CISA’s Secure by Design principles, and international standards like IEC 62443 all reflect a growing recognition that digital infrastructure is a national security issue. Companies that get ahead of this shift will not only reduce risk, they will build competitive advantage in a world where downtime can become a strategic weapon.

In the AI era, data centers are essential infrastructure for modern economies and national security. Their rising importance also makes them attractive targets in cyber and physical conflict. Protecting them is no longer just about safeguarding company operations, it is about protecting the systems society depends on every day. 

Grant Geyer is the chief strategy officer at Claroty.

The post Why data centers now belong on the critical infrastructure list appeared first on CyberScoop.

What happened?

Between 13:09 UTC and 18:51 UTC on 18 March 2025, a platform issue resulted in an impact to a subset of Azure customers in the East US region. Customers may have experienced intermittent connectivity loss and increased network latency sending traffic within as well as in and out of East US Region. 

At 23:21 UTC on 18 March 2025, another impact to network capacity occurred during the recovery of the underlying fiber that customers may have experienced the same intermittent connectivity loss and increased latency sending traffic within, to and from East US Region.

What do we know so far?

We identified multiple fiber cuts affecting a subset of datacenters in the East US region at 13:09 UTC on 18 March 2025. The fiber cut impacted capacity to those datacenters increasing the utilization for the remaining capacity serving the affected datacenters. At 13:55 UTC on 18 March 2025, we began mitigating the impact of the fiber cut by load balancing traffic and restoring some of the impacted capacity; customers should have started to see service recover starting at this time. The restoration of traffic was fully completed by 18:51 UTC on 18 March 2025 and the issue was mitigated. 

At 23:20 UTC on 18 March 2025, another impact was observed during the capacity repair process. This was due to a tooling failure during the recovery process that started adding traffic back into the network before the underlying capacity was ready. The impact was mitigated at 00:30 UTC on 19 March after isolating the capacity impacted by the tooling failure. 

At 01:52 UTC on 19 March, the underlying fiber cut has been fully restored. We continue working to test and restore all capacity to pre-incident levels. 

Our telemetry data shows that the customer impact has been fully mitigated. We are continuing to monitor the situation during our capacity recovery process before confirming complete resolution of the incident.

An update will be provided in 3 hours, or as events warrant