Our Nation’s Enduring Cyber Mission

January 18, 2025

By National Cyber Director Harry Coker, Jr.

Cybersecurity is unlike traditional national security, which is essentially run by the Federal Government alone to defend physical territory against kinetic threats. What happens in cyberspace has real implications for every aspect of our daily lives, even though it is a virtual space.

That virtual world was largely created by Americans – the digital revolution was christened with Federal leadership and cohesion, Defense Department support, academic creativity, private sector ingenuity, and talented, hard-working people. 

Today, we need those same elements – and more – to secure cyberspace, because technological innovations in cyber, artificial intelligence (AI) and uncrewed military platforms have brought America into a new strategic demesne. Looming on the horizon is quantum computing, promising even more disruption, sooner than we think.

The US must acknowledge, embrace, appropriately prioritize, and address these opportunities and threats now.  

Every level of government, every size and type of business, every community, and the vast majority of individual Americans depend on the Internet every day – cyberspace reaches deeply into American life, bringing many benefits.

But nation-states and criminal organizations are exploiting this reach to steal money and intellectual property, and threaten our national security and economic prosperity. The quality of life that every American deserves is being jeopardized by digitized malefactors.

Almost a year ago, I had the opportunity to testify before Congress on the cyber threat the People’s Republic of China (PRC) poses to the US, alongside my partners from US Cyber Command, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. 

There, the FBI announced that through Operation Volt Typhoon, China was intentionally pre-positioning inside of and targeting the cyber underpinnings of our critical infrastructure. The PRC was working to circumvent our defenses. 

A year later, their intention is unchanged, and the threat is still as pervasive and widespread. More recently, we’ve seen the PRC target our telecommunications sector in Operation Salt Typhoon. The scale of these attacks targeting our critical infrastructure is unprecedented and there is no sign they will stop. Make no mistake – cyberspace is a battlefield.

While the US government is able to manage great power competition in some respects, we need to acknowledge and address the cyber crisis that is already upon us – one that reaches beyond what can reasonably be called mere “competition.”

To protect critical infrastructure against this threat, the Federal Government is working tirelessly with our public and private sector mission partners. But we need to do more, in partnership with both the private sector companies that own and operate most of America’s infrastructure, and the tech companies who provide security. 

We have to find ways to support and better resource critical infrastructure from healthcare to water systems, to transportation, to power, to every sector of the economy. This requires further strengthening the cyber capacity of the Federal agencies that assist each sector.

At the same time, we have to secure our State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) governments, which increasingly endure sophisticated cyberattacks from nation states and non-state malicious cyber actors.

The US government has offered concrete solutions like Protective Domain Name Service (PDNS) to help better safeguard our schools and community institutions from ransomware attacks; tech industry partners provide free or discounted cybersecurity resources for smaller SLTT organizations.

However, these efforts have not met the needs of the moment. We must develop and deploy scalable cybersecurity solutions for the countless communities across our great Nation that are target rich and cyber poor.

National security and economic prosperity are shared responsibilities. Because of the decentralized nature of the digital world, and because everyone is connected to it, we all need to work together. That takes strong engagement across every level of government, every sector of critical infrastructure, and with people in every community and partners around the globe. 

Cyberspace is a borderless battlefield that is growing every day. As a Nation, we must adjust our traditional view of national security and do two things:

(1) appropriately prioritize cyber now

(2) resource cybersecurity accordingly

We are Americans, and we can meet any challenge. We can let neither the complexity of securing the digital world nor the time and funding it will take deter our Nation from this mission. We must stand resolute and meet this challenge together.