US Cybersecurity Roadmap: Atlantic Council’s National Strategy for Critical Infrastructure

Why the US Needs a Cybersecurity Roadmap Now

The United States stands at a critical inflection point in its approach to national cybersecurity. In January 2026, the Atlantic Council published a landmark two-part report arguing that the defense of information technology and operational technology systems is as essential to national security as border protection and missile defense. The report arrives at a moment when cyber threats from nation-state adversaries and criminal organizations have reached unprecedented levels of sophistication and frequency.

The core argument of the Atlantic Council cybersecurity roadmap is straightforward: the IT and OT systems that underpin national security, the US economy, and public safety require a comprehensive operational strategy — not piecemeal responses to individual incidents. This perspective shifts the cybersecurity conversation from reactive breach management to proactive national defense planning.

The timing is significant. Recent high-profile cyber campaigns, including operations attributed to Chinese groups like Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, have demonstrated that adversaries are pre-positioning within US critical infrastructure networks. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has repeatedly warned that these intrusions represent strategic preparations for potential conflict, not merely espionage operations. Against this backdrop, the Atlantic Council’s call for a comprehensive cybersecurity roadmap carries particular urgency.

The Four Pillars of the Atlantic Council Strategy

The Atlantic Council’s cybersecurity roadmap rests on four interconnected pillars that together form a comprehensive national defense framework. These pillars are designed to address the full spectrum of cyber threats — from deterrence and offensive capability to defensive operations and foundational technology adoption.

The first two pillars focus on operational capability: offensive cyber campaigning to deter adversaries and defensive cyber campaigning to protect networks and systems. The second pair addresses structural resilience: enhanced protection for critical infrastructure and the adoption of foundational technologies including zero trust architecture and safe coding practices.

What distinguishes this framework from previous national cybersecurity strategies is its explicit parallel to conventional military defense planning. Just as the United States maintains both offensive and defensive conventional military capabilities, the Atlantic Council argues, the nation must develop coordinated campaign-level planning for both offensive and defensive cyber operations. This campaign-level approach represents a significant departure from the incident-response model that has historically dominated US cybersecurity posture. Understanding how these strategic frameworks translate into actionable insights is precisely the kind of analysis that Libertify’s interactive library makes accessible to professionals across industries.

Offensive Cyber Campaigning and National Deterrence

The first pillar of the Atlantic Council’s cybersecurity roadmap addresses the development of coordinated offensive cyber capabilities. Rather than individual operations conducted in isolation, the report advocates for campaign-level planning that integrates offensive cyber actions with broader national security objectives.

Offensive cyber campaigning involves sustained, coordinated operations designed to impose costs on adversaries, disrupt their capabilities, and deter future attacks. This approach recognizes that defensive measures alone are insufficient when facing persistent threats from well-resourced nation-state actors. The concept of “defend forward,” introduced in the 2018 Department of Defense Cyber Strategy, is foundational to this pillar, but the Atlantic Council pushes further by calling for systematic campaign planning rather than ad hoc operations.

A key element of this pillar is maintaining competitive advantage in the offensive cyber supply chain. As highlighted in the Atlantic Council’s related research by Winnona DeSombre Bernsen, the United States must secure its position against China in the offensive cyber tools and capabilities market. This competition extends beyond government operations to encompass the broader ecosystem of vulnerability research, exploit development, and cyber weapons capabilities. The strategic implications are clear: a nation that cannot maintain offensive capability cannot credibly deter cyber aggression.

The report frames cyber deterrence using the same logic that underpins nuclear deterrence: adversaries must believe that the costs of an attack will exceed any potential benefits. Achieving this requires not only offensive capabilities but also clear communication of US willingness to use them and attribution capabilities that eliminate the ambiguity adversaries rely on.

Building Defensive Cyber Operations at Scale

The second pillar focuses on transforming defensive cybersecurity from reactive incident response into systematic defensive campaigning. The Atlantic Council argues that current defensive postures — waiting for attacks and responding after the fact — are fundamentally inadequate against persistent, sophisticated adversaries.

Defensive cyber campaigning involves continuous, proactive operations that identify threats before they materialize, hunt for adversary presence within networks, and coordinate defensive actions across government and private sector entities. This requires significantly enhanced visibility into network activity, advanced threat detection capabilities, and rapid information sharing between organizations.

The report draws on lessons from Russia’s wartime cyber operations against Ukraine, analyzed in detail by Justin Sherman in a related Atlantic Council publication. These operations demonstrate that modern cyber campaigns are layered and complex, combining technical exploitation with information operations and physical attacks. Defending against such multi-dimensional threats requires equally sophisticated defensive campaigns that go beyond traditional network security.

Central to this pillar is the concept of coordinated defense — ensuring that the discovery of a threat in one organization leads to protective action across all potentially affected entities. This has been a persistent challenge for US cybersecurity, as information sharing between government agencies and between the government and private sector remains fragmented despite years of policy effort.

Critical Infrastructure Resilience in the Digital Age

The third pillar addresses what the Atlantic Council describes as the need for “significantly enhanced” resilience for key critical infrastructures. The deliberate use of “significantly enhanced” implies that current resilience levels are inadequate to withstand the threats these systems face.

Critical infrastructure spans 16 sectors designated by the Department of Homeland Security, including energy, water, transportation, healthcare, financial services, and communications. Each of these sectors increasingly relies on interconnected IT and OT systems that create both efficiency gains and security vulnerabilities. The convergence of IT and OT environments — where traditional information systems connect to physical control systems — has dramatically expanded the attack surface for critical infrastructure.

The roadmap proposes a tiered approach to critical infrastructure protection, recognizing that not all infrastructure is equally critical and that resources must be allocated according to risk and consequence. This prioritization framework is essential because the scope of critical infrastructure is vast, and attempting to provide equal protection to all assets is neither feasible nor cost-effective.

Resilience in this context means more than preventing attacks — it encompasses the ability to continue operating during an attack, limit damage when attacks succeed, and rapidly recover to full operational capability. This requires redundancy in critical systems, regular testing of backup and recovery procedures, and investment in operational technology security that has historically lagged behind IT security.

Zero Trust Architecture as a National Security Imperative

The fourth pillar of the Atlantic Council’s cybersecurity roadmap identifies two foundational technology mandates, the first of which is the implementation of zero trust architecture across government and critical infrastructure. Zero trust represents a fundamental paradigm shift in network security, moving from the assumption that everything inside a network perimeter is trusted to the principle that no user or device should be trusted by default.

In a zero trust architecture, every access request is verified regardless of where it originates. Users must authenticate continuously, devices must meet security requirements before gaining access, and network access is granted on a least-privilege basis — users receive only the minimum access necessary to perform their functions. This approach eliminates the devastating consequences of perimeter breaches, where a single compromised credential can grant an attacker access to entire networks.

The Atlantic Council’s endorsement of zero trust aligns with existing federal mandates, including Executive Order 14028 and the OMB’s Zero Trust Architecture Strategy. However, the report argues that implementation has been too slow and too narrow. While federal agencies have made progress toward zero trust, critical infrastructure operators in the private sector have largely not adopted these principles. The report examines how governments worldwide are approaching this challenge — an analysis that aligns with the type of policy intelligence available through Libertify’s interactive research experiences.

Implementing zero trust at national scale is a massive undertaking that requires significant investment in identity management, micro-segmentation, continuous monitoring, and automated enforcement. The Atlantic Council recognizes this challenge but argues that the alternative — continuing to rely on perimeter-based security in an era of sophisticated adversaries who routinely breach perimeters — is untenable.

Safe Coding Practices and the Software Supply Chain

The second technology mandate within the fourth pillar focuses on the development and adoption of safe coding practices. This recommendation addresses cybersecurity at its most fundamental level — the software that runs on every system in the digital economy.

The concept of “shifting security left” into the software development lifecycle has gained significant traction in recent years, driven by high-profile supply chain attacks like SolarWinds and the Log4j vulnerability. The Atlantic Council’s roadmap elevates safe coding from a best practice to a national security imperative, arguing that the volume of vulnerabilities in widely deployed software represents a systemic risk to national security.

Safe coding practices encompass memory-safe programming languages, automated vulnerability testing, secure development frameworks, and software bills of materials (SBOMs) that provide transparency into software components. The report recognizes that transitioning legacy codebases to memory-safe languages is a generational challenge but argues that new development should prioritize memory safety as a default requirement.

Software supply chain security extends beyond individual coding practices to encompass the entire ecosystem of libraries, dependencies, build systems, and distribution channels that modern software relies on. A single vulnerability in a widely used open-source library can affect millions of downstream applications, as the Log4Shell incident demonstrated. The Atlantic Council’s roadmap calls for systematic approaches to supply chain security that include automated dependency scanning, signed builds, and verified distribution channels.

Public-Private Partnerships in Cyber Defense

A cross-cutting theme throughout the Atlantic Council’s cybersecurity roadmap is the essential role of public-private partnerships. The private sector owns and operates approximately 85% of US critical infrastructure, making government-only approaches to cybersecurity fundamentally insufficient.

The roadmap defines explicit roles for government agencies and private sector operators, recognizing that each brings unique capabilities and faces distinct constraints. Government agencies possess intelligence capabilities, legal authorities for offensive operations, and the ability to coordinate across sectors. Private sector organizations possess intimate knowledge of their own systems, operational expertise, and the agility to implement technical solutions rapidly.

The report’s related research on cybersecurity information sharing highlights a critical gap: small and medium-sized businesses are being disproportionately targeted by cyberattacks but are largely excluded from existing information-sharing frameworks. Congressional action is needed to upgrade these frameworks and ensure that threat intelligence reaches the organizations that need it most.

Effective public-private partnerships in cybersecurity require mutual trust, legal protections for information sharing, and mechanisms for rapid coordination during incidents. The Atlantic Council’s roadmap builds on existing structures like the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) while calling for deeper integration between government threat intelligence and private sector defensive operations. These insights on cross-sector collaboration reflect the kind of strategic analysis available in Libertify’s interactive document library.

Nation-State Threats: China, Russia, and Criminal Networks

The Atlantic Council’s cybersecurity roadmap is shaped by the reality of current threat actors. China and Russia represent the most significant nation-state cyber threats to the United States, while criminal organizations — increasingly operating with tacit state support — pose growing risks to economic security.

China’s cyber operations have evolved from primarily espionage-focused activities to strategic pre-positioning within US critical infrastructure. Groups like Volt Typhoon have been identified within energy, water, and communications networks, apparently preparing for potential disruption during a future conflict scenario. The Atlantic Council’s related research on the offensive cyber supply chain emphasizes that competition with China extends to the tools and capabilities used for cyber operations themselves.

Russia’s approach to cyber warfare, refined during its conflict with Ukraine, demonstrates the integration of cyber operations with military, informational, and economic instruments of power. The “nesting doll” nature of Russian cyber operations — with multiple layers of governmental, quasi-governmental, and criminal actors operating in overlapping spaces — presents unique attribution and response challenges. Understanding these tactics requires the kind of campaign-level analysis that the Atlantic Council’s roadmap promotes.

Criminal cyber organizations represent a third major threat category, with ransomware operations imposing billions of dollars in costs on US businesses annually. The intersection of criminal and state-sponsored activity creates a complex threat landscape where attributing attacks and determining appropriate responses becomes increasingly difficult. The roadmap’s emphasis on both offensive deterrence and defensive resilience reflects the need to address this full spectrum of threats simultaneously.

Implementing the Cybersecurity Roadmap: Policy Recommendations

Translating the Atlantic Council’s four-pillar cybersecurity roadmap into reality requires coordinated policy action across multiple dimensions. The report provides the president and national leadership with a framework for achieving cybersecurity capabilities equivalent to those maintained for physical homeland defense.

First, organizational clarity is essential. The roadmap calls for clearly defined roles and responsibilities among federal agencies including CISA, the National Security Agency, US Cyber Command, the FBI, and sector-specific risk management agencies. Overlapping authorities and unclear lines of responsibility have historically hampered coordinated cyber defense.

Second, resource allocation must reflect the severity of the threat. The report’s framing of cybersecurity as equivalent to border security and missile defense is a deliberate argument for commensurate funding. Current cybersecurity spending — while significant — does not match the scale of investment in conventional defense capabilities that face comparable threat levels.

Third, legislative action is needed to modernize the legal frameworks governing cybersecurity. This includes updating information-sharing authorities, providing liability protections that encourage private sector cooperation, and establishing clear legal frameworks for offensive cyber operations. The report notes that existing legislation has not kept pace with the evolution of cyber threats.

Finally, international cooperation remains a critical dimension. Cybersecurity is inherently a global challenge, and the United States must work with allies and partners to establish norms of behavior in cyberspace, coordinate responses to shared threats, and build collective resilience. The Atlantic Council’s broader portfolio of cyber-focused research, including work from the Cyber Statecraft Initiative and Digital Forensic Research Lab, supports this multilateral approach to cyber defense.