Cyber deterrence is designed to impose cost, risk, and uncertainty in ways that alter a threat actor’s risk-benefit and disrupt their operations — especially early in the attack chain, where access becomes control and persistence. This makes it harder and increasingly unlikely for threat actors to achieve meaningful strategic value. 

A threat actor’s risk-benefit is the decision on whether the expected payoff of a cyber operation outweighs the cost, risk, likelihood of exposure or attribution, potential consequences, and probability of failure. Effective cyber deterrence works by shifting that balance decisively in favor of cyber defenders. 

As the new White House Cyber Strategy unfolds in 2026, it is important for government agencies and private sector organizations alike to recognize the significant importance of privilege disruption as a key choke point for cyber deterrence.

Persistent Engagement Reshaping U.S. Cybersecurity Posture

Defending the nation against persistent engagement in cyberspace requires a strategic shift away from reactive cybersecurity approaches, particularly those that rely heavily on post-compromise detection or adversary psychology to discourage cyberattacks. A cyber deterrence strategy is most effective when applied early in the attack chain and ATT&CK lifecycle, where imposing cost, risk, and uncertainty has the greatest impact on adversary decision-making. This approach assumes compromise and focuses on denying threat actors the ability to achieve their objectives — thereby reshaping the cost-benefit equation that underpins their cyber operations.

The concept of Persistent Engagement, first articulated by the U.S. military, reflects the reality that nation-states will actively engage in cyberattacks against U.S. infrastructure, and often will work in the “gray areas,” working below the threshold to avoid triggering a full-scale military response. This ranges from ransomware to intellectual property theft to espionage and pre-positioning, all designed to produce meaningful strategic impact if left unchecked. 

This is best reflected in cyberattacks we see across critical infrastructure organizations, in key sectors like education, healthcare and financial — targets that will avoid potential military actions. The goal is to destabilize critical areas within the U.S. infrastructure and economy. 

Formalizing Privilege Disruption to Deny Control

In almost all cyberattacks, threat actors need privilege to fuel their operations. Privilege disruption is the deliberate denial and containment of privilege access, escalation, and misuse by cyber defenders, ensuring that an initial access does not become control and persistence for threat actors.

The goal of privilege disruption is to make threat actor’s operations less effective and attractive by implementing and designing access with robust privilege management and least privilege controls that prevent progression and strategic impact. This also nullifies lateral movement and pre-positioning that threat actors use to increase their dwell times and fuel their operations. 

Key aspects for privilege disruption should include the following (but not limited to):

• When and how privilege is gained or used across the entire identity estate.
• Early warning detection before escalation enables lateral movement and persistence.
• Reduces the privilege attack surface, raising the cost and uncertainty in reshaping risk-benefits. 
• Deliberate denial of progression and any meaningful impact. 

Privilege disruption is a prevention-first approach that gives cyber defenders the opportunity to disrupt cyberattacks by denying threat actors’ ability to convert initial access into full control. 

With this, below are some examples of prevention-first approaches for privilege disruption:

• Cyber defenders can deny privilege escalation: This can significantly increase successful collapse in progress and impact. 
• Cyber defenders can restrict lateral movement: This can limit the scope and degrade the speed of potential cyberattacks. 
• Cyber defenders can build ephemeral persistence into identity infrastructure: This eliminates long-term payoff and scale of operations. 
• Cyber defenders can reduce privilege control planes: This will greatly reduce any strategic impact on threat actors’ operations. 
• Cyber defenders shift focus to early disruption: This will increase the cost for threat actors’ operations before any meaningful value is realized. 

Active Defense: The Transition Point for Effective Offense

Privilege Disruption is not only the choke point for cyber deterrence — it is the transition point for offensive impact. In football, a dominant defense creates ‘short fields’ by pinning the opponent back, making it easier for the offense to score points. In basketball, defensive stops and defensive rebounds fuel the fast break, transitioning into favorable matchup on offense for easier buckets. Cyber strategy is no different. Offensive capabilities are most lethal when the adversary operations are physically constrained, with limited maneuvering space. 

When privilege access is unattainable and persistence is unreliable, it exposes threat actors’ higher-value infrastructure and tooling, increasing the cost and significantly diminishing their campaigns and operations. Any strategy from the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) must align defensive denial with offensive action. Without the ‘Denial Effect’ of privilege disruption, offensive capabilities are merely reactive and less effective, and threat actors will simply succeed elsewhere, facing fewer consequences for their attempts.

ONCD expanding private-sector roles to support offensive cyber is a sufficient approach, but to succeed and achieve intended outcomes, ONCD must modernize dated authorities, shift toward proactive policy frameworks to support denial and offensive alignment, and improve the structural deficiencies between intelligence and operations. 

It is no longer acceptable — or competitive — to rely on after-the-fact response models or post-compromise, episodic retaliation. A deterrence-driven cyber strategy must prioritize prevention-first approaches that deny adversaries the ability to achieve their objectives. Policy and cyber strategies must reinforce the reality that the rules of engagement in cyberspace are defined by persistent engagement and continuous competition.

Controlling the Privilege Control Planes

As the digital estate evolves across various domains such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and on-premises environments, one truth stands out: the privilege control planes are growing exponentially. This expanding attack surface, often not monitored and unmanaged, becomes the attack paths adversaries take to progress their initial access for pre-positioning, control, and lateral movement. 

Privilege control planes represent layers within the digital estate where elevated access is granted, exercised, inherited, and potentially abused. Many ransomware attacks and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) target multiple privilege planes to gain ubiquitous control that threat actors use to achieve stealth and resiliency in their campaigns and operations.

Salt Typhoon is a great example of how nation-state threat actors used multiple privilege control planes, across various global telecommunication networks to conduct one of the most damaging state-sponsored espionage campaign that affected U.S. telcom companies. The APT targeted the following privilege control planes:

• Edge and perimeter devices, typically routers and gateways.
• Once privilege access was gained at the edge devices, threat actors went to the heart of the network fabric, routing and switching to mirror traffic, intercepting data and creating persistence in the network fabric. 
• This lateral movement allowed threat actors to gain access to the CALEA (Communications Assistance for Lawful Enforcement Act) management plane. This gave them access to sensitive information law enforcement entities use for surveillance. 

Salt Typhoon is not an isolated incident. Campaigns like Midnight Blizzard (targeting Microsoft), Scattered Spider (targeting MGM/Caesars), and Storm-0501 (hybrid cloud ransomware) all relied on breaching multiple privilege control planes to achieve ubiquitous control.

These attacks expose a critical systemic weakness: modern detection capabilities struggle to contextualize multi-step techniques when they transition across disparate privilege environments. Cyber deterrence depends on disrupting adversary movement across these privilege control planes before access turns into control, persistence, or impact, and the only way to do that is to take a prevention-first approach that leverages continuous visibility and actionable identity telemetry across the entire identity estate.

Shaping Adversary Behavior with a Prevention-First Approach

One of the goals for the new cyber strategy as noted by National Director Sean Cairncross, is to shape adversarial behavior by redefining how the United States responds to threat actors. He noted that under this strategy, deterrence will move beyond symbolic sanctions and toward meaningful, enforceable consequences that degrade adversaries' capacity to act. He further states that cybersecurity is no longer a reactive exercise, but a proactive campaign to shape adversary behavior through coordinated federal action and strengthened industry partnership. 

While the strategy pillar to 'modernize federal networks' sounds straightforward, it requires a seismic shift: moving away from post-compromise detection that allows for high dwell time, and toward a prevention-first approach. Shaping behavior in cyberspace requires more than episodic retaliation — it requires Privilege Disruption to systematically deny an adversary's progression and ensure that initial access never translates into strategic impact.

A prevention-first approach is the ultimate playbook for shaping adversary behavior. If done correctly, it will force threat actors to change behavior when repeated attempts fail to convert access into control, forcing threat actors to abandon or retool their attack strategy. Relying solely on detection is reactive and does not stop or change adversary behavior. 

A robust cyber deterrence strategy must instead shape adversary choices before, during, and after an engagement — fundamentally shifting the risk, time, and cost calculus of a campaign or operation. Privilege Disruption is the operational engine of this approach: it sustains cost imposition and creates the structural advantages necessary for our offensive capabilities to succeed. 

By shortening the playing field through Privilege Disruption, we deny the adversary the operational space required to maneuver. This structural advantage shifts our offensive approach from tactical and reactive, into a strategic campaign setting the condition for the U.S. government to dictate meaningful consequences.