Perspective: CybersecurityTrump Is Rattling Sabers in Cyberspace — but Is the U.S. Ready?

While U.S. cyber defenses are improving, some experts worry about how the nation would recover from an even larger strike — such as one on the scale of the suspected Russian cyber-assault that blacked out power to more than 200,000 Ukrainians in 2015.

Industries are already bracing for an uptick in cyberattacks after last month’s news that U.S. Cyber Command had launched digital strikes on targets in Iran, including missile-launching computer systems that may have been involved in attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.

Michael B. Farrell, Tim Starks, and Gavin Bade write in Politico that last month, a division of the Treasury Department issued a rare warning to the financial sector to increase protections against destructive Iranian attacks. That followed similar warnings to U.S. companies from the Department of Homeland Security and private cybersecurity firms.

Businesses and government agencies are already on the front lines of global cyber conflicts, which have seen Chinese hackers steal valuable trade secrets from companies such as Hewlett Packard and IBM, Russian and Iranian attacks designed to implant malicious software inside the electric grid, and “ransomware” assaults such as the one on Baltimore.

The worst-case scenario, says Art House, the chief cybersecurity risk officer for Connecticut and the former chairman of the state’s utilities commission, is that the U.S. gets into an escalating round of hacking attacks with some hostile power that spins out of control — with no plan for what to do next.