A likely partial government shutdown after Friday would impair the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's operations, leading to diminished capabilities in critical areas including cyber response, security assessments, stakeholder engagements, training exercises and special event planning, a top official said this week. CISA would furlough a majority of its workforce and just one-third would remain on the job under shutdown conditions, agency acting director Madhu Gottumukkala told House appropriators on Wednesday.
"These incidents involve the intentional use of deceptive or illegal practices to fraudulently obtain money, assets, or information from individuals or institutions, and include actions carried out over cyber channels."
Rhyne's attack involved unauthorized remote desktop sessions, deletion of network administrator accounts, and changing of passwords, showcasing significant security vulnerabilities.
CISA's guidance is intended to assist critical infrastructure stakeholders, which includes private sector entities across various sectors, with implementing an insider threat mitigation program that combines physical security, cybersecurity, personnel awareness, and community partnerships. Although framed for critical infrastructure, CISA's guidance is relevant to a broader range of organizations, including those outside of critical infrastructure sectors.
Uncle Sam's cyber defenders have given federal agencies just three days to patch a maximum-severity Dell bug that's been under active exploitation since at least mid-2024. CISA this week added the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-22769, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, ordering civilian agencies to secure affected systems by February 21 - giving them just three days to get fixes in place.
Thorpe described the KEV updates as representing a material change to an organization's risk posture. "Your prioritization calculus should shift. But there's no alert, no announcement. Just a field change in a JSON file," the expert said. "We're good at reacting to new disclosures. Decent at tracking active exploitation. But we're not great at noticing when the characterization of existing threats evolves," Thorpe noted.