At Black Hat USA 2023, Jen Easterly, Director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Victor Zhora, Deputy Chairman and Chief Digital Transformation Officer of the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine, gave a joint presentation on the need for resilience.
Key to their discussion was not just strong cyber defenses, but building out resilience to continue to operate critical systems in the face of disruption. Ukraine has withstood attacks better than many expected at the start of the war — much of that is their resilience of spirit, feelings of unity and the Ukrainians’ unwillingness to give up. But another part of that is their cyber resilience. While the scale of this war has shocked the world, this was not the first time Ukraine has been under attack, and they have learned how to build resilient systems because of earlier attacks when the stakes were lower.