What CISOs Should Fear From a US-Russia Détente

By Phil Muncaster for Assured
Thursday, March 27, 2025

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There are some reasons to be cautiously optimistic about what happens next. For one, the NSA is not included in the Pentagon order to stand down operations against Russia. It’s believed the agency was involved in the infamous, and highly sophisticated, Stuxnet campaign that disrupted Iran’s nuclear programme back in 2010. So there is theoretically still some firepower to draw on. It’s also unclear just how easily all US Cyber Command operations could simply be dropped.

“Certain cyber operations are conducted in strict secrecy and there is no central register or repository of such operations for obvious reasons. Even the director of an agency may be unaware of all of them,” says British Computer Society (BCS) fellow and cybersecurity expert Ilia Kolochenko. “Moreover, the very nature of some operations, like taking control of remote infrastructure to stealthily exfiltrate some data, simply cannot be stopped immediately without causing damage to the infrastructure in question or eventually exposing the entire operation.”

BCS fellow Kolochenko tells Assured Intelligence “the overall strategy must remain the same”, including “a zero trust architecture, multilayered defences, continuous security monitoring and security testing, dedicated incident response, robust third-party risk management, and ongoing cybersecurity training and awareness for all employees.” Read Full Article