Infrastructure as a Strategic Target of War

Recent public statements by senior U.S. officials acknowledging the use of cyber and cyber-enabled effects during military operations in Venezuela mark a meaningful inflection point for the critical infrastructure community. 

While technical details remain classified and open-source reporting cannot conclusively distinguish between cyber, electronic warfare and kinetic effects, the strategic signal is clear. Infrastructure-level disruption is now an overt and acknowledged tool of state power.  

For critical infrastructure owners, operators and the companies that build and support these systems, this moment should prompt a reassessment of long-held assumptions about targeting, escalation and resilience. 

This assessment reflects an analysis of open-source reporting and public administration statements. The ambiguity itself is instructive. 

What we know and why ambiguity matters 

According to public reporting, non-kinetic effects from U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Space Command were used to suppress Venezuelan defenses ahead of kinetic operations. Caracas also experienced widespread power outages and internet disruptions during the operation. Whether these effects resulted from cyber intrusion, electronic warfare, kinetic infrastructure disruption or a combination remains unclear. 

For operators, the cause matters less than the outcome. Loss of grid power, loss of communications and degradation of command-and-control functions are the operational realities that drive risk. Modern conflict blends cyber operations, electronic attack, space-enabled effects and kinetic action into a single operational picture. Critical infrastructure should be designed and governed accordingly. 

A changed threat landscape for critical infrastructure 

Several shifts now warrant direct attention. First, nation-state adversaries will aggressively analyze any observable infrastructure disruption. Russia and China will seek to understand failure modes, exploited dependencies and whether vulnerabilities, including potential zero-days, were involved. Even partial insight informs future campaigns against Western-aligned infrastructure. 

Second, the public acknowledgment of infrastructure disruption blurs the line between covert cyber activity and open warfare. Infrastructure-level effects are no longer confined to the shadows. This lowers the threshold for power, communications, transportation, financial and industrial systems to be used as instruments of coercion during political crises short of declared war. 

Third, technology supply chains are becoming explicitly geopolitical. If adversaries believe Western governments leverage deep knowledge of commercial platforms or vendor-specific architectures, incentives increase to remove Western technology from hostile environments. Conversely, Western governments will face pressure to mandate the removal of non-allied components from domestic infrastructure. The result is a fragmented global technology ecosystem, with real operational consequences for both operators and vendors. 

Finally, long-standing norms protecting civilian infrastructure continue to erode. Even when legally justified, repeated normalization of infrastructure disruption increases systemic risk for commercial and municipal systems worldwide. 

Cyber implications for critical infrastructure operators 

• Expect collateral impact: Government-on-government cyber operations do not remain contained. In Venezuela, power and connectivity disruptions affected banks, transportation systems, businesses and civilian communications. Operators should assume that regional instability can result in sudden or prolonged outages, regardless of whether they are the primary target.
• Critical sectors are high-value targets by design: Energy, telecommunications, finance, healthcare and transportation systems are targeted precisely because disruption degrades national function. The cyber incident affecting Venezuela's state-owned oil company underscores that commercial entities can be operational objectives in broader campaigns.
• IT/OT convergence amplifies blast radius: As enterprise IT, cloud and OT environments converge, compromise in one domain can rapidly cascade into another. Flat networks, shared identity services, obsolete equipment and persistent remote access paths create failure modes that compliance frameworks alone were not designed to address.
• International footprint equals exposure: Organizations with global operations or perceived strategic relevance face elevated risk of retaliation, coercion or preemptive intrusion, including through suppliers and service providers embedded in critical infrastructure ecosystems.

Implications for boards and technology providers 

For boards, this risk is not solely a cyber issue. It is simultaneously operational, financial, regulatory and national security risk. It is externally driven, not fully preventable and best governed through preparedness, resilience of investment and clarity of accountability. 

For technology providers serving critical infrastructure, assumptions must shift. Products must tolerate degraded environments, intermittent connectivity and constrained operations. Resilience, recoverability and operational transparency matter as much as feature sets. Supply chain provenance and remote access design will increasingly factor into trust decisions. 

• Boards and executives should be asking:
  • If a regional grid fails, can we sustain safe operations?
  • If a primary cloud region is unavailable, do we have a test failover?
  • If national telecom networks are disrupted, how do we communicate with staff and ensure safety?

What cyber resilience looks like in this environment  

In a nation-state context, resilience must be engineered for deliberate disruption, not just criminal activity or accidental failure. 

• Plan for infrastructure instability as a baseline condition: Operators should assume loss of grid power, loss of terrestrial communications and degraded cloud availability are plausible during geopolitical crises. This requires hardened backup power, redundant communications paths and validated manual operating procedures for safety-critical functions.
• Architect for containment, not just prevention: Assume initial access will occur. Design environments to prevent compromise from propagating into operations. Strong segmentation between IT and OT, disciplined control of remote access, and clear ownership of identity dependencies are foundational.
• Design for prolonged disruption: Offline and immutable backups, out-of-region recovery options, segmented networks to isolate areas of conflict, and recovery time objectives that reflect geopolitical reality, not just service-level agreements, are essential. Incident response plans should assume days-long disruption of cloud, telecom or regional infrastructure, not hours.
• Integrate geopolitical risk into cyber operations: Cybersecurity can no longer be decoupled from geopolitical analysis. Organizations should define clear escalation triggers, such as geopolitical "tripwires" that elevate their security posture, restrict access, accelerate backups or shift to manual operations. These decisions create friction, but delaying them increases risk.
• Strengthen intelligence and coordination. Participation in sector ISACs and trusted public-private coordination mechanisms is critical. Early, imperfect intelligence is often more actionable than late certainty during nation-state campaigns.

The world is changing 

The most significant implication of recent events is the continued erosion of norms protecting civilian critical infrastructure. Even when legally justified, visible use of cyber and cyber-enabled effects against power and communications systems accelerates a global shift toward treating civilian infrastructure as a legitimate instrument of warfare.  

For critical infrastructure operators and the companies that support them, the message is clear: resilience and recovery are now matters of national security relevance. Organizations should assume they may be targeted not for their own actions, but for their strategic utility during geopolitical conflict. 

Designing for this reality, both technically and operationally, is no longer optional at the board level. 

A few of the ways WWT can help

• Board & Executive Briefings: Translate nation-state and critical infrastructure risk into operational, financial and governance implications.
• Cyber & Operational Resilience Planning: Design resilience strategies for deliberate disruption, beyond compliance, audits or ransomware.
• Identity, Segmentation & Recovery Readiness: Assess and strengthen identity dependencies, network segmentation, backups and recovery sequencing across IT, OT and cloud.
• Scenario Planning & Tabletop Exercises: Run realistic disruption scenarios aligned to geopolitical risk and infrastructure dependencies.

To learn more, reach out to your World Wide Technology account team.