Cybersecurity Lessons From the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the challenge of ensuring resilience and continuity in a connected world. Many of the effects of this new breed of crisis can be significantly ameliorated through advance preparations that yield resilience, coherence, and focus as it spreads rapidly through the entire system, stressing everything from emergency services and supply chains to basic human needs and mental health. The pandemic produces cascading effects and high levels of uncertainty. It has undermined normal policymaking processes and, in the absence of the requisite preparedness, has forced decision makers to craft hasty and ad hoc emergency responses. Unless a new approach is devised, crises like COVID-19 will continue to challenge the modern American way of life each time they emerge. This annex collects observations from the pandemic as they relate to the security of cyberspace, in terms of both the cybersecurity challenges it creates and what it can teach the United States about how to prepare for a major cyber disruption. These insights and the accompanying recommendations, some of which are new and some of which appear in the original March 2020 report, are now more urgent than ever.
 

Interested in cybersecurity? Check out this GovWhitePapers blog post! You can also find events on cybersecurity on our sister site, GovEvents.