At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Caitlin Durkovich leads the Department’s efforts to strengthen public-private partnerships and coordinate programs to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure, assess and mitigate risk, build resilience, and strengthen incident response and recovery. She spoke with The Cipher Brief about what DHS is doing to protect critical infrastructure.
TCB: What types of actors, such as states, terrorists and criminals, represent the greatest threat to our critical infrastructure? How do you expect these threats to change in the future?
Caitlin Durkovich: I think we do well in preparing for known challenges, but we also face new hazards and potential impacts to infrastructure from events like extreme weather and climate change, aging and failing infrastructure, and certainly cyber attacks. When we look at the past and study our future needs, we see that our infrastructure is becoming more complex and more interconnected, and our physical infrastructure is increasingly more reliant on cyber networks and systems to operate.
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