Cyber Kinetic
I came across a new term while reading This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth a brilliant deep dive into the cyber arms race.
It describes a cyberattack with kinetic (real-world) effects attacks that move beyond the digital realm to cause physical harm. Think dam gates opening, power grids failing, or emergency numbers going dark.
These are the nightmare scenarios and they’re becoming more common, and increasingly difficult to defend against.
So how do we, as smaller IT and security teams, defend against a motivated adversary with nation-state resources and patience?
Do we accept that everything networks, endpoints, even our assumptions is already compromised, and build around that reality?
A “not if, but when” mindset where resilience matters more than prevention?
Air-gapping, while useful, has its own gaps (Pun inteneted) especially in operational technology, where updates and maintenance often become the very vector for compromise.
Is end to end encryption, to inculded data at rest and data in motion a way to solve this.
Perhaps it’s time we shift the conversation: from stopping attacks, to surviving them and acknowledging what security professionals are truly up against.
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