When the U.S. first started to focus on and worry about cybersecurity, the threats were assumed to have been from small, non-state actors that would have the capabilities of shutting down massive parts of the nation’s critical infrastructure. While these threats should still be of concern, they should no longer be the focus of what the United States is preparing for. In fact, the largest threat vectors for the United States in the current era are hostile states such as Russia, China, and North Korea, all of which have launched attack after attack on the U.S. in recent decades. This paper proposes that, moving forward, the U.S. needs to reevaluate what it considers threats in the cyber domain, and it should plan for state-sponsored threats accordingly.
