Three Big Cybersecurity Challenges for the Trump Administration

An article by Jonathan Greig in The Record quotes Anne Neuberger’s reply when asked what the most pressing cybersecurity issues the Trump administration will confront when it takes over in January and which it should tackle first.

“I’m going to put them into three bins,” said Neuberger, US deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies. “China, criminal groups like ransomware actors, and then AI, which cuts across all of them.”

The problem with China, she says, includes the theft of corporate R&D and the theft of government secrets. All governments do it, says Neuberger, but in the case of China, there is a relatively new wrinkle that goes beyond intelligence gathering. China has been “pre-positioning” into networks with no intelligence value—like water and power systems—thereby laying the groundwork for possible future disruptions in crisis.

For the present, though, according to Neuberger, the most serious cyberspace problem is ransomware attacks, more than half of which are directed at US targets. In 2023 alone, US organizations are said to have paid about $1.3 billion in ransom.

Neuberger maintains these issues are relatively bipartisan, and she expressed hope the Trump administration would continue to heed a lesson the Biden administration learned the hard way from the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack: regulators and the private sector need to cooperate on formulating and adopting effective cybersecurity standards, in some cases one sector at a time.

She says that the process began under the Biden administration, and pipeline companies have adopted minimum standards, with the railroad and aviation sectors well along in the process.

Two controversial political and economic issues may complicate the process. One is the looming entrenchment of the  cryptocurrency industry under Trump, and the other is the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (the so-called “Chevron decision”), which, as Greig writes, “will affect how federal agencies go about regulating the industries they govern.”