Under Trump, U.S. cyber defenses have lost their minds
when i walk When I walked into Jean Easterly’s office in Arlington, Virginia, on a sunny day in January, I was greeted by the sight of a giant shark head lurking on the floor. I immediately spotted a Rubik's Cube – the Eastern Symbol – emblazoned with the logo of the organization she has run for the past three and a half years, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) under President Donald Trump. Created during its first term.
Eastleigh, 56, jumps up to greet me. The first thing that caught my eye was her jeans, which had a dragon on one leg and a snake on the other. She then launched into an update on CISA's animated “Protecting Our World” video series, while lamenting that she hasn't had time for private guitar lessons in weeks. It seemed like a normal day at work to her, except for one thing. By January 20, Inauguration Day, Easterly's time at CISA will be over. Trump fired CISA's first director, Chris Krebs, after she refused to challenge the integrity of the 2020 election, and Easterly now says she was not asked to stay. There are rumors that the CISA program — and even the entire agency — could soon be on Trump’s chopping block.
The timing could not be worse for the country to lose its top cybersecurity cop. A Beijing-linked group called “Salt Typhoon” spent months last year rampaging through U.S. telecommunications systems, stealing call logs, recordings, text messages and possibly even location data. Many experts are calling it the largest hack in U.S. telecommunications history. Early last year, Easterly and her agency unknowingly discovered Salt Typhoon activity in federal networks, a warning sign that ultimately accelerated the unraveling of the espionage operation.
The work of expelling Chinese spies from their victim networks is not over yet, but CISA’s walls are closing in. Kristi Noem, Trump's nominee for Homeland Security secretary, told a Senate committee last week that CISA needs to be “smaller” and “more nimble.” One day after taking office, all members of the Cybersecurity Review Board — appointed by Easterly and actively investigating the Salt Typhoon breach — were fired.
In 2021, when Easterly officially became the agency’s second director, the government was still reeling from another blockbuster hack — that of SolarWinds. Kremlin-backed intruders compromised widely used software to penetrate the networks of U.S. agencies and other targets. Helping American institutions defend themselves becomes a more urgent and daunting project. CISA does not enforce the law or gather intelligence; its job is to promote digital security measures and provide free services so agencies can learn what they need to do to not get hacked, or, more realistically, to reduce the severity of being hacked. Easterly began building relationships with the federal government as well as state and local officials, business executives and utility managers. In crises such as the Salt Typhoon campaign, these relationships are critical to quickly containing damage.
It takes a strong-willed person, and perhaps a charismatic one, to build rapport with such a wide range of people. Easterly has this background: She has worked in the Army (multiple deployments), the National Security Agency and the National Security Council under Barack Obama, and spent nearly five years running Morgan Stanley's Global cyber security. She also helped establish U.S. Cyber Command within the Department of Defense. But somehow she was standoffish. In an effort to break the ice, and perhaps to impress, Easterly poured his passion into speaking and networking with executives and utility operators across the country during his tenure. Yes, there's her eclectic style—a mix of high fashion (by cybersecurity standards, anyway) with bell-bottoms and Birkenstocks—but there's also her quietly intense obsession with solving digital defense conundrums.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, combining on- and off-camera segments. Check wired'YouTube channel For video.