COMMENTARY: The
federal government shut down midnight Oct. 1 after Congress failed to reach a budget deal.
Today, both parties are still at odds with one another, with no end to the shutdown in sight.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has remained operational the past week, but it's significantly constrained under shutdown contingency rules. And to avoid any confusion, It’s the information-sharing authority in the
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015) that has lapsed.
[
SC Media Perspectives columns are written by a trusted community of SC Media cybersecurity subject matter experts. Read more Perspectives here.]
This twin shock exposes a deeper threat: our national dependence on reactive, centralized threat flows just as adversaries compress the time from disclosure to weaponization to hours or minutes.
Since its 2018 formation, CISA (the agency) has excelled at alerts, additions to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, and advisories.
The current shutdown has forced the agency to prioritize urgent advisories, while slowing broader guidance, straining talent, and disrupting critical cyber coordination. And when paired with the lapse of the CISA 2015 information-sharing framework and the continued delay of the final rule for the
Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) — now slated for May 2026 — it underscores how brittle the ecosystem has become.
As we saw with the
MITRE CVE funding scare and the accelerating pace of exploitation, over-reliance on a few chokepoints can widen attack windows precisely when defenders can least afford it. The mission must shift: from after-the-fact signaling to preemptive defense and exposure reduction at machine speed.
Right now, adversaries are exploiting vulnerabilities within days — or even minutes. We recently reported that nearly 30% of all bugs added to the KEV were weaponized within 24 hours of disclosure. What this says is simple: the reactive alerts we receive from CISA are no longer sufficient.
The fragility of centralized threat intelligence
If this feels like déjà vu, that's right. Earlier this year, the MITRE CVE scare sent a strong message about how dependent the global cybersecurity community has become on a single vulnerability repository. With the clock ticking down, doubts began to grow about its stability. These doubts had security teams contemplating the potential impact of such a lapse on their efforts to protect their companies. This includes everything from delayed patches and blind spots to dramatically widened attack windows.
Now we’re going through this all over again. Today, CISA (the agency) has become synonymous with after-the-fact alerts. CISA routinely issues advisories on exploited vulnerabilities, compromised infrastructure, and evolving attack techniques. While it’s valuable information, the speed at which it arrives pales in comparison to how fast attackers gain traction and wreak havoc today.
The traditional vulnerability management model has grown out-of-step with modern threats, as it requires organizations to wait for CVE publication, apply patches on a cycle, and hope that detection tools catch intrusions. Waiting and hoping are no match for zero-day attacks that are weaponized faster than ever, and machine-speed attacks that exploit any delays between disclosure and response.
Some security leaders argue that CISA should shift its focus to being a resilience enabler, helping industries anticipate exploitation and proactively mitigate any exposures before they spread. Here, teams would focus on disaster recovery and business continuity planning, incident response preparedness, rapid system restoration, backup, and layered defenses that can absorb and mitigate attacks that do slip past perimeter controls.
A call for preemptive defense
Resilience offers a big step forward, but it’s not the answer. We need a more preemptive form of defense that gets ahead of threats using dynamic exposure management to identify and mitigate exploitable weaknesses before they are discovered by adversaries.
Also, the industry needs tools that can continuously shrink attack surfaces. Options here include automated resilience that taps machine learning, automated moving target defense, and other proactive measures. Teams should also consider distributed threat intelligence, which builds redundancy into vulnerability reporting and sharing to avoid over-reliance on any single feed or database.
Why CISA’s evolution matters
Now that the government has shut down, the stakes extend well beyond compliance deadlines or bureaucratic mandates. Every day the shutdown continues puts us at risk.
Once the federal budget gets resolved, CISA must evolve and embrace future-ready models of proactive exposure management capable of helping industries shut down attacks before they’re weaponized.
Now that’s an evolution that could turn CISA from a bearer of bad news into a cornerstone of national cyber resilience.
Brad LaPorte, chief marketing officer, MorphisecSC Media Perspectives columns are written by a trusted community of SC Media cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
