Pressure Record: Sensitive-but-Unclassified No Longer Inherits Protection

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CybersecurityHQ issues and preserves dated, bounded external cyber judgment.
Not news reaction. Not advisory opinion. Not consensus analysis.

Assumption Under Stress Sensitive-but-unclassified environments inherit meaningful protection from their proximity to classified systems.

Constraint Logged Salt Typhoon accessed congressional committee staff email across China policy, foreign affairs, intelligence, and armed services oversight functions. ServiceNow's AI agent platform carried an unauthenticated impersonation flaw (CVSS 9.3) for months before public disclosure. VoidLink surfaces as a cloud-native Linux persistence framework engineered to operate across AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba, and Tencent, with container escape and credential harvesting built in. In each case, the target environment sits outside hardened perimeters but inside decision flows. Staff networks handle pre-decisional policy. AI agents manage identity operations. Cloud infrastructure hosts workloads and secrets. Attackers do not distinguish between classified and unclassified. They optimize for access to intent.

Unresolved Tension Whether boundary models that treat sensitive-but-unclassified as a lower protection tier remain viable when adversaries treat it as a higher value tier.

Coverage spans ongoing CISO intelligence and versioned decision artifacts, depending on use context.