(PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images)
If you’re feeling numb to the endless cycle of data breaches and hacks, you aren’t alone.
At the RSAC 2026 Conference in San Francisco, four former directors for the US’s National Security Agency gave their view on today’s cyberthreats, including whether the American public “even cares about cyber anymore?”
“So I think we’ve become numb to it,” said Paul Nakasone, the former NSA director who served from 2018 to 2024.
“I think we continue to see these different intrusions and the intrusions have gotten to a size that the scale is just too incredible to me. And I think that we are out of balance in terms of being able to keep up with the adversary,” he later added.
His predecessor, former NSA director Mike Rogers, shared a similar view. “I think for society, we are just becoming so numb to this. We are starting to accept this in some ways as the price of living in the digital age.”
Even though the US is the largest economy in the world, Rogers noted the country still lacks a federal data privacy law and has struggled to pass major cybersecurity-related legislation. “I see a government that’s unwilling to spend political capital to really drive fundamental change in cyber,” he added. “And it’s a reflection of the fact that politically we are so divided and as a society we are so divided.”
While data breaches and hacks can trigger financial loss and chaos—from data-wiping to hospital shutdowns—the activities usually stop short of causing widespread loss of life or devastating physical destruction. It’s why Roger also said: “We have not yet had a level of trauma that has driven fundamental behavioral change. We haven’t had thousands die — I hope we never do, don’t get me wrong —but it seems like we just haven’t had a level of pain that’s fundamentally reshaped the calculus.”
The directors didn’t mention an easy solution. But former NSA director Timothy Haugh, who left last year under some controversy, said the US government is moving in the “right path” by leveraging the private sector more to help crack down on hacking threats. He referenced ongoing information-sharing activities and Google’s recent efforts to disrupt hackers earlier on, “upstream” by shutting down the infrastructure they use.
Meanwhile, former NSA director Keith Alexander signaled the cyber challenges are poised to grow with the arrival of AI, saying the US must lead in the technology over China. “Because whoever's the lead will be the future superpower,” he said.
Alexander also pointed to a potential danger of the US allowing the most cutting-edge AI chips to flow to China, and alluded to potential military uses of the technology.
“China is the power that will test us,” he said. “If you think about the most obvious use of AI it’s against Taiwan, against the US, to ensure that we don’t go and fight back, hitting us with cyber and all the economic things that go with it, our nation would crumble, we’re not ready for it, we haven’t thought our way through that. That’s the future of what’s coming ahead of us.”