Estonia's cyber ambassador weighs in
With help from John Sakellariadis
Driving the Day
— European officials are working to respond to the withdrawal in U.S. cybersecurity funds for Ukraine, and looking at moving forward without Washington.
HAPPY MONDAY, and welcome to MORNING CYBERSECURITY! This newsletter may be focused on cybersecurity, but the real news today is the arrival of two new members of the POLITICO cyber family! The first is maybe a tad too young to write for us, but she IS the daughter of my colleague John Sakellariadis, who became a member of the dad club last week. John will be out for the next few months, and we can't wait to see photos of baby Lena in her POLITICO onesie.
And, in another piece of amazing news, we're welcoming our new full-time Morning Cybersecurity writer, Dana Nickel, who starts today! Dana has already been a part of the POLITICO family as a digital producer, and we are all thrilled to have her on board! Reach out to Dana ASAP with tips and contact details.
Follow POLITICO's cybersecurity team on X at @RosiePerper, @johnnysaks130, @delizanickel and @magmill95, or reach out via email or text for tips. You can also follow @POLITICOPro on X.
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Today's Agenda
The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security holds a meeting of the Emerging Technology Technical Advisory Committee. 9 a.m.
The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology holds a virtual briefing on 'Strengthening U.S. Energy Infrastructure Cybersecurity.' 11 a.m.
The Council on Foreign Relations holds a virtual discussion on 'Navigating the Gray Zone - Strategies to Address Hybrid Warfare.' 11 a.m.
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei speaks at a virtual discussion on 'the future of U.S. artificial intelligence leadership' hosted by The Council on Foreign Relations. 6:30 p.m.
The International Scene
FRIENDS?... IN THE NORTH — Cyber officials in Europe have been left reeling by the withdrawal of U.S. cyber funds for Ukraine, and may seek to move away from working with U.S. companies as the rift between Washington and Brussels widens, Estonia's cyber ambassador told your MC host.
Tanel Sepp, the Estonian ambassador at large for cyber policy, said in a wide-ranging interview that following the Trump administration's recent pullback on funding and support for Ukraine, as well as for traditional European allies the European Union's cybersecurity officials are left a bit stunned — but also contemplating action.
'Everybody is trying to figure out and make sense of what happened,' Sepp said. 'We are going to have, within the EU, a cyber commanders and cyber ambassadors meeting under the Polish presidency, and there will be some other meetings coming.'
Sepp said despite these upcoming convenings, there have not been any 'substantial discussions' about how to move forward on cybersecurity issues without U.S. involvement. But he noted that it's likely 'this moment will still come.'
— Tangible impact: One part of the pullback in U.S. cyber support for Ukraine, as your MC host detailed in National Security Daily on Friday, is the evaporation of U.S. funding for the Tallinn Mechanism, a program established in 2023 to coordinate government and private sector cyber aid to Ukraine. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the funds.
Sepp, one of the key leaders of the mechanism, said that half of the €200 million from donors and foreign assistance efforts was tied to the U.S. government, and that those funds had been cut. As a result, he said he is 'running around trying to find some cover' to fill the financial gap, such as speaking with other potential government donors that he declined to detail.
'I am working with the assumption we are not getting a dime from the U.S. government,' Sepp said. 'It's an extremely tricky situation, and I just don't understand the justification for this.'
The ambassador also predicted that U.S. companies are likely to feel the sting of the Trump administration pulling support in Europe, as EU leaders will be less likely to trust them and may turn to alternatives for everything from cybersecurity to satellite services.
— Active threat space: Estonia is the key nation in Europe that often leads on cybersecurity issues, and hosts annual NATO cyber warfare exercises in Tallinn. The nation has been forced to zero in on cybersecurity in the past two decades as Moscow has increasingly targeted Estonian networks. Sepp said there were 6,500 successful cyberattacks against Estonian systems in 2024, double 2023, and said most were likely tied back to Russia. Hybrid threats to the EU generally have already increased in the past year, including cyberattacks.
In the face of these threats, Sepp said his nation and the EU had no choice but to persevere.
'We will stay calm and carry on,' Sepp said. 'There is no point in reacting to every single piece of news that comes from D.C., but it's confusing and it is sad to see that also these principled, allied values are kind of at stake here.'
At the Agencies
MORE CUTS — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last week signed an order directing the end to eight federal advisory committees, including those focused on cybersecurity and AI issues, according to an order obtained by John.
— Who's who: According to the order, the eight advisory committees set to be disbanded immediately are the Homeland Security Academic Partnership Council; the Tribal Homeland Security Advisory Council; the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board; the Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program; the Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee; the Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee; the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council; and the Cyber Investigations Advisory Board.
Noem in the order cited the need to comply with an executive order Trump signed in mid-February that directed agency leaders to identify federal advisory committees that could be cut as part of the overhaul of the federal government.
Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for U.S. Secret Service, confirmed to your MC host that the Cyber Investigations Advisory Board, which USSS oversees, has been disbanded, but declined to comment further.
Spokespersons for DHS and for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has oversight of the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council, did not respond to requests for comment on the order.
— Big picture: The move comes weeks after a slate of other advisory committees — including the Cyber Safety Review Board — saw their membership gutted by a previous order from DHS leadership, and as the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency continues to work through potential cuts to personnel at CISA.
On The Hill
STAY VIGILANT — The Republicans leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee want the Transportation Security Administration to be 'flexible' on how it approaches cybersecurity regulations for key critical sectors.
Committee Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.), cyber subcommittee Chair Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), transportation and maritime security subcommittee Chair Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), and committee member Rep. Sheri Biggs(R-S.C.) late last week sent a letter to TSA Acting Administrator Adam Stahl urging the agency to take a careful approach to setting cyber standards.
'TSA must ensure that its cybersecurity framework is not only effective but also agile enough to respond to multiple simultaneous cyber incidents that impact different nodes of the transportation sector without compromising operational continuity,' the lawmakers wrote.
— A whole lotta history: The letter was sent after TSA put out a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in November that would mandate some rail and pipeline companies to establish cyber risk management programs. It also comes years after the Biden administration put TSA at the forefront of creating regulations for these sectors following the 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline that temporarily left much of the U.S. East Coast without fuel.
Many oil and gas pipeline operators pushed back against the 2021 effort by TSA, and the lawmakers in their letter stressed that 'we are concerned that the Biden administration did not take this pragmatic and balanced approach to regulation for the Transportation Systems Sector.'
— Next steps: A spokesperson for TSA declined to comment on the letter. The House Homeland Security Committee's cyber subcommittee is set to hold a hearing on 'examining the opportunity to improve the cyber regulatory regime' on Tuesday.
Industry Intel
AI TEAM UP — Organizations including Cisco, IBM, Intel and Microsoft have teamed up to establish a new open source and standards group for developing artificial intelligence products.
OASIS Open and the Data & Trust Alliance on Friday announced the upcoming launch of the OASIS Data Provenance Standards Technical Committee, with the tech companies serving as founding sponsors. The aim is to create standards for AI products aimed at strengthening trust and accountability.
People on the Move
Stefani Jones is now director of cybersecurity programs at the Aspen Institute, according to our friends at POLITICO Playbook. Jones most recently was senior policy adviser at CISA.
Quick Bytes
DOGE CONCERNS — Officials at U.S. Cyber Command are increasingly worried that the emails sent by federal employees to DOGE each week detailing their accomplishments pose a major cyber and national security risk, The Washington Post's Alex Horton and Warren P. Strobel reported.
SO LONG — The technology teams at the General Services Administration are among those being targeted by DOGE for cuts, NextGov's Eric Katz and Natalie Alms reported.
STRAIGHT TO JAIL — A federal jury in Ohio on Friday convicted a Texas man of sabotaging his company's networks by introducing malicious code that crashed systems, at one point impacting thousands of the company's users, the Justice Department announced.
Chat soon.
Stay in touch with the whole team: Rosie Perper (rperper@politico.com); John Sakellariadis (jsakellariadis@politico.com); Maggie Miller (mmiller@politico.com); and Dana Nickel (dnickel@politico.com).
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The United States initially separated itself from that operation. In the Trump administration's first public statement about those strikes, Rubio emphasized that Israel took 'unilateral action against Iran,' adding that the United States was 'not involved.' But then, a few days ago, Trump mused on his social media platform about the ability of the United States to kill Iran's 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, anytime he wanted. And Saturday night, he made clear that the United States was all in, and that contrary to Rubio's statement, the country was now deeply involved. Now, having set back Iran's enrichment capability, Trump is clearly hoping that he can seize on a remarkable moment of weakness -- the weakness that allowed the American B-2 bombers to fly in and out of Iranian territory with little resistance. After Israel's fierce retaliation for the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks that killed over 1,000 Israeli civilians, Iran is suddenly bereft of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Its closest ally, Syria's Bashar Assad, had to flee the country. And Russia and China, which formed a partnership of convenience with Iran, were nowhere to be seen after Israel attacked the country. That left only the nuclear program as Iran's ultimate defense. It was always more than just a scientific project -- it was the symbol of Iranian resistance to the West, and the core of the leadership's plan to hold on to power. Along with the repression of dissent, the program had become the ultimate means of defense for the inheritors of the Iranian revolution that began in 1979. If the taking of 52 American hostages was Iran's way of standing up to a far larger, far more powerful adversary in 1979, the nuclear program has been the symbol of resistance for the last two decades. One day historians may well draw a line from those images of blindfolded Americans, who were held for 444 days, to the dropping of GBU-57 bunker-busting bombs on the mountainous redoubt called Fordo. They will likely ask whether the United States, its allies or the Iranians themselves could have played this differently. And they will almost certainly ask whether Trump's gamble paid off. His critics in Congress were already questioning his approach. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Trump had acted 'without consulting Congress, without a clear strategy, without regard to the consistent conclusions of the intelligence community' that Iran had made no decision to take the final steps to a bomb. If Iran finds itself unable to respond effectively, if the ayatollah's hold on power is now loosened, or if the country gives up its long-running nuclear ambitions, Trump will doubtless claim that only he was willing to use America's military reach to achieve a goal his last four predecessors deemed too risky. But there is another possibility. Iran could slowly recover, its surviving nuclear scientists could take their skills underground and the country could follow the pathway lit by North Korea, with a race to build a bomb. Today, North Korea has 60 or more nuclear weapons by some intelligence estimates, an arsenal that likely makes it too powerful to attack. That, Iran may conclude, is the only pathway to keep larger, hostile powers at bay, and to prevent the United States and Israel from carrying out an operation like the one that lit up the Iranian skies Sunday morning. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
