Here’s something that doesn’t happen every day: You’re on a plane back to the US after spending a holiday abroad, you finish watching a movie, and to kill some time you connect your phone to the plane’s WiFi (with a VPN of course) to check out the news. And you find out we’ve just taken over a South American country.
There’s plenty here to keep your eyes glued to cable news. But here’s the really interesting part for us cyber professionals: It included a cyberattack.
On January 3, 2026, at 2:01 AM Caracas time, explosions echoed across Venezuela’s capital. The lights went out across large portions of the city. President Trump later said, “the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have.” This has been widely interpreted as a rare reference to the use of offensive cyber capabilities.
This was part of a military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, demonstrating the latest evolution of hybrid cyber and kinetic warfare. And it’s a new reality those of us in cybersecurity need to understand.
What We Know (and Don’t Know)
President Trump’s somewhat cryptic comment and a later statement by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested a cyberattack was involved in the power outage used in the operation, serving as one of the methods used to cause disruption and protect air assets entering the city. Beyond that, we know little about the cyberattack itself, what techniques were used and how it played out. But we can follow a few threads.
On December 15, 2025, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA was hit with a cyberattack that the company blamed on the US as part of a strategy to control Venezuelan oil. Whether that attribution is accurate or not, it fits the pattern of a typical cyber operation: performing reconnaissance, testing defenses, getting in and maintaining persistence. Or maybe it was just to rattle their cage a bit. Regardless, we don’t know whether it was actually related to the January operation.
Data from NetBlocks suggests the blackout wasn’t a general grid failure but a series of precision outages that occurred in the specific windows when airborne assets were entering the capital’s airspace. These included low-flying helicopters that would’ve needed protection. While nothing links the two events, if they are connected, the cyber components were used for a very specific purpose, to protect and assist kinetic forces.
This isn’t a new approach; Russia purportedly did something similar in Ukraine in November 2023, tripping circuit breakers at a Ukrainian power substation, in coordination with a missile attack.
What This Means for Cyber Defenders
Operation Absolute Resolve’s hybrid kinetic-cyber nature has a lot of implications for the evolution of warfare that are already being widely discussed. But what does it mean for those of us in the cyber defense world?
It’s a wake-up call for anyone who still thinks the cyber and physical worlds are separate. We can’t just turn these systems off anymore. The Internet now extends into machines that not only impact the physical world, but also ones that we rely on to maintain, well, everything. And that connectivity comes with a whole bunch of threats.
It also brings a much larger set of threat actors. Impacting things in the physical world often isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially when they’re not close by or are protected. And even if you can get your hands on a device, you need to know what to do with it. If you don’t, maybe you can just break it, but it’s a lot easier to smash a smart phone than it is to smash a building. Explosives are hard to come by for a reason, and not many people know how to use them.
Think about the Mission: Impossible movies. Ethan has to put his life on the line whenever they need physical access to something. But Luther does his work from the van. And there are a lot more Luthers out there than Ethans.
So when a building’s systems connect to the Internet, a new world of options opens up for attackers. Your Security Operations Center (SOC) might be well protected against cyberattack, but can it still defend your systems if it loses power, or is cut off from your data centers or cloud providers? Does your physical security team have enough people to monitor the building if the surveillance system is taken out? Threat modeling this stuff can take a while.
Time’s Up
The Venezuela operation’s cyber, kinetic and space integration isn’t a new concept, but it is a spectacular demonstration of how defenses have a lot of catching up to do. While you may not have to worry about facing the full might of a top-tier nation-state, the window where the attackers you are worried about don’t use those techniques will close over time. If you haven’t been thinking about how to defend across those domains, it’s time to get going.
What does this mean for your organization’s defenses? What assumptions are you rethinking after watching how this operation unfolded? Those are the questions we’re thinking about, and we’re curious what other security professionals are working through as well.
Key Takeaways
- The Venezuela operation demonstrates that cyber and physical security are now inseparably linked, requiring defenders to think beyond traditional digital boundaries
- Cyber capabilities can enable kinetic operations by creating precision disruptions at specific times, as seen with Venezuela’s coordinated power outages
- The threat landscape expands dramatically when physical systems connect to the internet, making previously difficult attacks accessible to more threat actors
- Defenders need to evaluate whether their critical systems can function during power loss, network disruption, or surveillance system compromise
- Organizations must begin threat modeling across cyber, physical, and space domains now, as these integrated attack techniques will become more widespread
Sources
This newsletter is based on reporting and analysis from multiple sources covering Operation Absolute Resolve:
Primary Military Sources:
- Breaking Defense: “150 aircraft, cyber effects and ‘overwhelming force:’ How the Venezuela operation unfolded” (January 3, 2026)
- DefenseScoop: “US deploys 150-plus military aircraft, drones and other tech in raid to capture Venezuela’s Maduro” (January 3, 2026)
- Air & Space Forces Magazine: “US Airpower Paved Way for Special Ops to Capture Venezuela’s Maduro” (January 5, 2026)
- Defense One: “US spy agencies contributed to operation that captured Maduro” (January 3, 2026)
Cyber Operations Analysis:
- Bank Info Security: “US Action in Venezuela Provokes Cyberattack Speculation” (January 3, 2026)
- Bank Info Security: “Trump, the US and a Blackout: What Cut Off Venezuela’s Grid?” (January 5, 2026)
- Cybernews: “US hints at cyber role in Venezuela power outage during Caracas operation” (January 4, 2026)
- Security Affairs: “What is happening to the Internet in Venezuela? Did the U.S. use cyber capabilities?” (January 4, 2026)
- Cyber Security Review: “US cyber attacks plunged Caracas into darkness” (January 4, 2026)
- Cybersecurity Insiders: “It is official that US used Cyber Attacks to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro” (January 4, 2026)
- Digi Vista Hub: “Cyber Operations in Venezuela: Dark Power, High Stakes” (January 4, 2026)
- Breached.Company: “Operation Absolute Resolve: A Deep Dive into the Cyber, OSINT, and Intelligence Operations Behind Maduro’s Capture” (January 5, 2026)
Independent Monitoring:
- NetBlocks (via Twitter/X): Real-time internet connectivity monitoring during the operation (January 3, 2026)
News Coverage:
- CNN: Live updates and coverage (January 3-4, 2026)
- Al Jazeera: “How the US attack on Venezuela, abduction of Maduro unfolded” (January 4, 2026)
- PBS News: “A timeline of U.S. military escalation against Venezuela leading to Maduro’s capture” (January 3, 2026)
- The Conversation: “How Maduro’s capture went down – a military strategist explains what goes into a successful special op” (January 5, 2026)
Policy Analysis:
- Brookings Institution: “Making sense of the US military operation in Venezuela” (January 6, 2026)
- Chatham House: “The US capture of President Nicolás Maduro – and attacks on Venezuela – have no justification in international law” (January 6, 2026)
- Just Security: “International Law and the U.S. Military and Law Enforcement Operations in Venezuela” (January 6, 2026)
Technical Context:
- Mandiant (2023): Documentation of Russian Sandworm power grid attacks in Ukraine, referenced in Bank Info Security coverage
All sources were accessed between January 3-6, 2026. This post focuses on the technical and operational aspects of cyber-kinetic integration as reported by cybersecurity and defense analysts.