As the world’s attention is focused on the Israel-Hamas war, the United States is preparing for a variety of threats that could happen at any time closer to home.

Whether it’s a ransomware attack against a public school system or a natural disaster disabling the power grid, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency says building resilience is key.

What You Need To Know

  • The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency launched its Shields Ready campaign Tuesday

  • The goal is to increase the security and resilience of the country's critical infrastructure by ensuring an ability to effectively respond to and rapidly recover from a variety of potentially disruptive incidents

  • Shields Ready includes a guide to help governments and businesses prepare for natural disasters, cyberattacks, terrorism, growing international competition and other threats

  • It isn't a question of if disaster will strike but when, Cybersecurty and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly said at the campaign's launch in Long Beach Tuesday

“It’s not if an incident will occur. It’s a matter of when our nation faces a very serious array of threats and hazardous conditions that are changing and intensifying rapidly,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly said Tuesday at the Port of Long Beach, where she introduced a new campaign to help local governments, businesses and communities prepare for unexpected events so they can respond and recover more rapidly. “It’s incredibly important that we expect disruption to occur because we live in a world that is so connected, so interdependent, yet so vulnerable to a myriad of threats.”

Those threats run the gamut of more frequent and severe natural disasters, relentless criminal and foreign-sponsored cyberattacks, continued threats of terrorism and targeted violence, pandemics, changing migration and labor patterns, growing international competition and potential conflict, Easterly said.

Designed to drive concrete actions that build resilience and emergency preparedness into the country’s critical infrastructure systems, Shields Ready builds on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Ready public service campaign. Ready launched 20 years ago to help individuals learn about potential emergencies and disasters and prepare for them. Shields Ready broadens the scope to governments, businesses and communities, offering emergency managers a 57-page planning guide to help prepare for and respond to cyberattacks.

Throughout November, CISA and FEMA will co-host a series of webinars to educate emergency managers about the new guide.

Spearheaded by CISA and supported by FEMA, Shields Ready focuses on four key areas for resilience building, including the identification of critical assets and dependencies, risk assessments of those critical systems, the development of response and recovery plans and evaluations to update and improve their response.

“When you think about FEMA, you probably think about natural hazards and our ability to respond to and help communities recover from the severe weather events that we’re continuing to see and see increase as a result of climate change,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said Tuesday. “Our job at FEMA is not just to respond to these.”

It’s to help build resilience and preparedness to reduce the impact of severe weather events, she said.

“We’re seeing different types of severe weather events than we saw 10 years ago. We will see different weather events 10 years from now,” Criswell said. “Know your risk.”

While FEMA has traditionally been involved with physical risk preparedness and recovery, Criswell said Shields Ready is a campaign for emergency managers at all levels of government to know their risks in the digital space, whether it’s a cyberattack on water infrastructure, the power grid or a hospital.  

Water, healthcare, education, transportation, communication and other infrastructure “are all so deeply interconnected,” Criswell said. “We rely on them for public health, for defense, our economy and so much more. If one of the pieces of that interdependency is the single point of failure, the domino effects that we can experience and the consequences that we will have to manage will be very severe. Cyber resilience is infrastructure resilience. Ensuring that communities get the tools they need to protect themselves from cyber threats is one of our greatest priorities.”