Regulatory & Standards Drift: Executive Attestation Enforced Before Infrastructure Visibility Exists

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Between November 2025 and February 2026, federal and state cybersecurity regimes entered operational force that attach personal executive liability to attestations over infrastructure populations that have not yet been inventoried. This is the first regulatory cycle in which executive liability for cybersecurity attestations is enforced independently of asset visibility maturity.

Attestation obligations are now being formalized ahead of the infrastructure visibility they presume. These regimes converge not at the policy layer, but at the certification and examination layer, where personal liability attaches.

CISA BOD 26-02 (February 5, 2026): binding directive requiring federal agencies to inventory all end-of-support edge devices within three months, decommission devices already past support within twelve months, and remove all remaining end-of-support edge devices within eighteen months. CISA developed a non-public EOS Edge Device List. The directive acknowledges "widespread exploitation campaigns by advanced threat actors" already in progress. Continuous discovery process required within twenty-four months.

CCPA cybersecurity audits (effective January 1, 2026): CalPrivacy regulations require annual cybersecurity audits covering eighteen program components. Certifications must be signed by a member of the executive management team under penalty of perjury. The certifying executive cannot be the CISO where the audit is conducted internally. Compliance deadlines stagger by revenue. Risk assessment summary filings due to CalPrivacy by April 1, 2028.

NYDFS Part 500: all amended Cybersecurity Regulation requirements effective since November 1, 2025. 2026 is the first full examination cycle. Annual compliance certifications require co-signature by the highest-ranking executive and the CISO. Examiners will focus on asset inventories, MFA coverage, and third-party service provider oversight documentation.

CIRCIA final rule: publication delayed to May 2026. The rule will require 72-hour incident reporting and 24-hour ransomware payment reporting across an estimated 316,000 covered entities in sixteen critical infrastructure sectors. Scope definitions remain in rulemaking.

The certifying authority is now structurally upstream of the visibility authority. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued BOD 26-02 because it cannot confirm what edge devices exist on federal networks. The California Privacy Protection Agency requires executive attestation under penalty of perjury across eighteen control domains. The New York State Department of Financial Services requires CEO and CISO co-signature on annual compliance certifications. CIRCIA will add a mandatory reporting obligation for 316,000 entities against a scope definition that has not been finalized. CISA 2015 remains lapsed: the agency issuing binding device directives and constructing an incident reporting regime still lacks the statutory framework that protects the threat intelligence those programs depend on.

Personal liability is now being assigned at a layer of abstraction that no current regulatory regime has made fully observable.