A high-level executive at one of the world’s largest energy suppliers tells me he’s been losing sleep over aging infrastructure, budget cuts, and staffing shortages. Small utilities, he says, are plagued by “patches that might be easy to fix given the resources necessary.” But for now, “operators are running on Windows NT,” he says, referring to Microsoft’s 1990s operating system. New infrastructure coming online to support data center buildouts isn’t much better off. This infrastructure is “being built at such a speed [that] there’s no regulation and there are no hard standards,” says the energy executive. “Security is an afterthought, and that scares me a whole lot.”This is the part of the story where I’d love to reassure you that the powers that be have been hard at work bolstering our defensive systems. The reality is, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has lost nearly a third of its workforce and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, and it has failed to appoint an official director to lead the agency since the Trump administration took office in January of last year. But things at the state and local levels are what really worry the experts I spoke with. A recent Deloitte survey of state chief information security officers (CISOs) found that their budgets are failing to keep pace with growing threats—and have even faced cuts in 16% of the country.“For some reason, amidst increasing cyber-capabilities, our defenders are running out of money,” Soham Mehta, a research fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, tells me. “Great.”“Security is an afterthought, and that scares me a whole lot.”There is at least some indication that authorities are beginning to wake up. Earlier this month, the new White House AI task force met for the first time to discuss cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection, among other topics. Many are hopeful that frontier AI will do more to help companies and governments defend themselves than it will to help their attackers—as in the case of OpenAI’s assistance in discovering the PHP flaws. In a survey of more than a hundred national security officials last month, 81% said that defensive capabilities are very likely to improve with the help of AI.None of the experts I spoke with advised me to load up the bug-out bag just yet. For now, our fate is largely in the hands of the government officials and executives who have to make the choice to invest in updated security systems.They largely gave the same advice I’ve been working off for years. Set up a password manager, as well as two-factor authentication wherever it’s available. Beware of any unusual messages, and don’t drop your credit card details into any suspicious websites. And perhaps most importantly: Contact your local representatives to nudge them on updating that 1990s software.
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