America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

Summary

Opinion We almost lost the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database system, but that's only the tip of the iceberg of what President Trump and company are doing to US cybersecurity efforts. When it comes to technology security, let's face it. We're lame and we're lazy. But we don't normally go out of our way to make it worse. Until now. Until President Donald Trump and his cohort of tech minions, better known as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), took over. You might think, if you're outside the US, who cares? Unfortunately, whether you like it or not, the US has long taken the lead in technical security. Take, for example, the fact that we almost lost the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. Anyone familiar with cybersecurity will have heard of the CVE. It's the master list of essentially all security holes for the last 25 years. As Jen Easterly, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), explained on LinkedIn: "It's the global catalog that helps everyone – security teams, software vendors, researchers, governments – organize and talk about vulnerabilities using the same reference system." Without it, everyone is using a different catalog or no catalog at all, no one knows if they're talking about the same problem, and defenders waste precious time figuring out what's wrong. Worst of all, threat actors take advantage of the confusion. How could such an important project go under? Easily. It wasn't funded. The group that oversees the CVE, CISA, had been targeted for staff cuts of over a third of its employees. In addition, CISA employees were given until midnight Monday to choose between staying on the job or resigning. So it was that the decision to extend the MITRE CVE contract didn't come until literally the 11th hour. That contract will still run out in March 2026. Who knows if Trump et al will extend it again? Once upon a time, this kind of decision would be a no-brainer. I mea...