Cyber Attacks are Just as Damaging as Natural Disasters

It has been almost seven years since the White House issued Presidential Policy Directive 40, setting out the federal continuity policy “to maintain a comprehensive and effective continuity capability through Continuity of Operations (COOP), Continuity of Government (COG), and Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG) programs, ensuring the resilience and preservation of government structure under the United States Constitution and the continuous performance of National Essential Functions (NEFs) under all conditions.”

The Ukraine war demonstrates the importance of that resilience. The Register reported in April that Rob Joyce, director of the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity branch, at a recent conference said that “Ukraine has been under tremendous cyber pressure for years, long before the invasion … And so they, by necessity, had to learn from that. They got religious about backups; they got to the point where their sysadmins understood how to respond to a breach, clean up, and move on. They were practiced.”

Learning Objectives:

• Outline the ways cyberattacks are more dangerous than natural disasters to government agencies’ ability to continue operations
• Review the differences between data backup and recovery from a cyberattack and from a natural disaster
• Evaluate the impact of the federal zero trust mandate on implementing data recovery measures