Cyber Focus: Cybersecurity, National Security, and Critical Infrastructure

Winning the AI race takes more than building the best model. It demands hardened infrastructure, reliable energy, and the public's confidence. As AI accelerates cyberattacks and China establishes footholds inside American pipelines, ports, and power grids, will policymakers and industry leaders act before a crisis forces their hand? In this inaugural Cyber Focus: Unplugged roundtable, Frank Cilluffo convenes McCrary Institute senior fellows Bill Evanina, Alison King, Cynthia Kaiser, and Rob Joyce. Drawing inspiration from The McLaughlin Group, the panel debates AI's advantage for attackers, Congress's cyber priorities, how to impose costs on China, and whether CISA has the resources to deliver on its new strategy. The discussion closes with blunt predictions on Taiwan, Russian aggression in Europe, and the future of U.S. cyber policy. Main topics Is AI giving attackers the upper hand? What does winning the AI race require? Can the U.S. build public support for AI? What should Congress prioritize on cyber? Will Congress renew Section 702? How should the U.S. impose costs on China? Can CISA deliver on its new strategy? What comes next for Taiwan, Russia, and U.S. cyber policy? Key quotes "Prepositioning, for all the right reasons, is absolutely a terrorism thing. If you look at what they've done to our critical infrastructure, if that was another country... we would be in a war." — Bill Evanina "You don't establish that credibility through guidance. You establish that credibility by executing the controls and demonstrating that they work." — Alison King "We're so worried about having the exact attribution, the exact... technical smoking gun, that China's conducting many, many other attacks that are beyond Volt Typhoon... and we have a fear of calling them out unless we absolutely know with 105% certainty that that's happening. And we have to get better at that because they're using us for our process to be able to give themselves the strategic ambiguity they need to conduct more and more activities." — Cynthia Kaiser "People often pound on the table and say we should cyber them harder. Cyber doesn't deter cyber. I'm sorry, you're not going to cyber them out of our critical infrastructure. We've got to use these other tools. And unfortunately, the biggest hammer we have is economic, and we're unwilling to use that right now." — Rob Joyce "When we look at frontier models, I have yet to see so much power reside in the hands of so few…to think that they're not intelligence targets for foreign intelligence services is asinine." — Frank Cilluffo Links Cyber Focus — McCrary Institute CISA 2030: Defend, Harden, Prevail CI Fortify About the Panelists The panelists participate in their capacity as McCrary Institute senior fellows, rather than as representatives of their respective employers. Bill Evanina is founder and CEO of the Evanina Group and former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. Rob Joyce is founder of Joyce Cyber and former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency. Cynthia Kaiser leads Halcyon's Ransomware Research Center as senior vice president and previously served as deputy assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division. Alison King is vice president of government affairs at Forescout Technologies, with previous roles at CISA, the Department of the Navy, and the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.

CISA's new cyber strategy puts a difficult question at the center of national cyber defense: How do you decide what to protect first? Recorded at the New York Stock Exchange, this special episode of Cyber Focus brings together host Frank Cilluffo and CISA Acting Director Nick Andersen to discuss the new cyber strategy, protecting critical infrastructure, and measuring resilience. Andersen explains why the agency must prioritize its highest-consequence work, asks private sector partners to hold CISA accountable, and emphasizes the outcome that matters most to communities: keeping essential services available. Main topics CISA 2030's three pillars CI Fortify: isolation and recovery Critical infrastructure priorities Private sector partnerships and accountability CISA's review of agency activities Measuring resilience across sectors Key quotes "We've got to prioritize. And that means making some tough decisions and making some tough calls." — Nick Andersen "CISA is an agency that is all carrots, no sticks." — Nick Andersen "[Communities] care about the essential services that need to be delivered and they care about that persistent availability of the things that they're relying on just to be able to live their lives." — Nick Andersen Links and resources CISA unveils new strategy to strengthen national cyber defense and critical infrastructure security About the Guest: Nick Andersen is Acting Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where he leads efforts to reduce risks to America's cyber and physical infrastructure. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, he has held senior cybersecurity roles at the Department of Energy, the White House, and in the private sector.

Can cyber defenses built around human attackers keep pace with AI? Brad Medairy, president of Booz Allen's National Cyber Practice and a McCrary Institute senior fellow, joins Frank Cilluffo to discuss what his team's testing reveals about AI's ability to conduct cyber operations and navigate industrial systems. They examine how these capabilities lower barriers for attackers, why deploying defensive AI requires trust and human accountability, and what executives should do to assess readiness. The conversation also explores active cyber defense and the need to keep essential services running through a compromise. Main topics AI-driven cyber operations Frontier model testing U.S.–China capability gaps Industrial systems at risk AI attack simulations Human oversight and accountability Deception and active defense Operating through compromise Board oversight and readiness Key quotes "Today, with an agentic attack, with an AI-enabled cyber operator that can operate at speed and scale, I think the defender does not have the advantage. It can't move at that pace." — Brad Medairy The way that we've seen models be able to rip apart these [OT] environments, understand the protocols, understand the control system, it's really phenomenal in terms of the capabilities that they provide… the risk to critical infrastructure is at an all-time high." — Brad Medairy "I don't think that we're going to defeat the threat of the future that's so transformative by just automating past operating models and approaches." — Brad Medairy "These adversary capabilities are progressing much faster than cyber defenses. And so you're gonna have to continually assess your environment, continually assess your controls, continually evolve your program." — Brad Medairy "We're inventing new operating models, we're inventing new technologies for cybersecurity. And I think now is our time to really define the future. It's going to take… really working this problem together." — Brad Medairy Resources discussed Booz Allen's Cyber Weapons Index McCrary Institute–Booz Allen joint paper: "AI-enabled threats demand mission-speed resilience – here's how to build it" McCrary Institute–Booz Allen joint paper: "Outpacing AI-enabled cyber threats: A playbook for government CISOs" About the Guest: Brad Medairy is president of Booz Allen's national cyber business, leading the development of defensive and offensive cyber solutions to address America's toughest cyber challenges. His work spans AI, machine learning, cloud innovation, and intelligence tradecraft. He leads thousands of cyber operators, security researchers, and software engineers who secure supply chains, protect critical infrastructure, and defend 5G networks, space systems, and advanced weapons platforms. His team counters sophisticated adversaries for customers including the intelligence community, U.S. Cyber Command, FBI, CISA, and the Department of War.

How do you know the person on the other end of a video call is who they claim to be? For Cybersecurity Awareness Month, host Frank Cilluffo welcomes iProov Chief Technology Officer Dominic Forrest to Cyber Focus to discuss how deepfakes are changing fraud, cybersecurity, and digital trust. Forrest demonstrates how a single photograph can be used to impersonate someone on video and explains why awareness alone isn't enough. The conversation examines how impersonation can give attackers access to organizations, what protections employees and consumers need, and how leaders can evaluate defenses. They also explore the challenge of verifying that AI agents are acting with a person's authorization. Main Topics Convincing deepfakes made with free software Why familiar faces and voices aren't proof of identity Verifying identity and genuine presence Fake employees and critical infrastructure access Securing onboarding and account recovery Protecting consumers from impersonation scams Testing and updating deepfake defenses Verifying human authorization for AI agents Key Quotes "I've spent the last 13 years of my life looking at fake faces, and I know today I can't tell the difference between a fake face and a genuine face on a Teams call or on the end of a camera."— Dominic Forrest "But you cannot put this on the consumer. In the same way as in companies, we do not put phishing entirely on the employee." — Dominic Forrest "The test I use is if I was in a street and there was a curtain in front of me, would I hand the money through the curtain if I could not see who was on the far side? Because you cannot trust what it is you can see." — Dominic Forrest "But sometimes at those critical moments, you have to bring it back to the human and say, did this person who I know and I trust authorize this? And is the action that's taking place actually the action that they authorized?" — Dominic Forrest "The test I use is if I was in a street and there was a curtain in front of me, would I hand the money through the curtain if I could not see who was on the far side? Because you cannot trust what it is you can see." — Dominic Forrest Resources Mentioned iProov CEN/TS 18099 Human Agency Protocol About the Guest: Dominic Forrest is responsible for iProov's technology vision, strategy, and roadmap which includes the design and development of its cloud-based infrastructure. Dominic has more than 25 years of experience in senior roles in telecommunications companies and internet service providers managing the implementation of large-scale projects including the launch of NTL's broadband service to over two million customers.

Keeping power, water, and other essential services running requires planning for what happens when cyber defenses fail. On this episode of Cyber Focus, Frank Cilluffo speaks with Stephanie Crowe, head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, and Nick Andersen, acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), about how two close allies are preparing critical infrastructure to operate through compromise. The conversation examines how governments and industry identify their most critical systems, turn shared intelligence into joint action, and prepare for attacks that cross sectors and borders. Crowe and Andersen also discuss how AI is changing cyber defense and what that means for infrastructure investment, workforce skills, and decisions in the boardroom. Main Topics Operating through cyberattacks Protecting critical assets and dependencies China's infrastructure prepositioning CI Fortify and joint industry planning U.S.-Australia and Five Eyes cooperation AI defense and aging infrastructure AI's energy demands Workforce skills and boardroom decisions Key Quotes "You have to be able to fight through compromise now, which is a really different way of thinking about the cyber threat." — Stephanie Crowe "We've come a long way from thinking about our number one cyber risk being data breaches and theft of information into a world where service disruption is now the thing that we have to really consider and plan in our cyber risk management." — Stephanie Crowe "And just to be completely honest, Australia really bailed us out when we were in the middle of our shutdown… Australia led from the front." — Nick Andersen "If the Congress decided that in the next budget that CISA needed to be quintupled in size, we're still not going to have enough resources to be able to meet every single area that we'd like to be able to stray into with our attention." — Nick Andersen "We know that we're seeing exceedingly aggressive, well-orchestrated campaigns, in particular from entities like China, that are engaged in a significant way to preposition across our critical infrastructure to hold it at risk at a time and place of their choosing." — Nick Andersen Links and Resources Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Australian Cyber Security Centre: Guidance and Resources About the Guests: Stephanie Crowe is Deputy Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate and Head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre. She has held senior roles in signals intelligence and cybersecurity, leading efforts to strengthen Australia's cyber defenses, build threat intelligence capabilities, and support industry during major cyber incidents. Nick Andersen is Acting Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where he leads efforts to reduce risks to America's cyber and physical infrastructure. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, he has held senior cybersecurity roles at the Department of Energy, the White House, and in the private sector.