The United States faces violent extremists, transnational criminal organisations (TCOs), adversarial nation-states, and malicious cyber actors. These threats, while varied in scope and intended purpose, at times compound one another in unexpected ways, according to the US federal Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment (HTA).
The document covers terrorism; illegal drugs; ‘influence operations’ by foreign states; physical and cyber attacks on critical national infrastructure; and economic espionage.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N Mayorkas said: “The Homeland Security Assessment provides an important overview of the dynamic and evolving threat landscape, illustrating just how varied and challenging the threats we confront are. It is because of the remarkable DHS workforce, and our close collaboration with our federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, and private sector partners, that we are able to meet the challenges and keep the American people safe and secure.”
As for terrorism, the 46-page assessment states that lone offenders and small groups continue to pose the greatest threat of carrying out attacks ‘with little to no warning’. On illegal drugs, the document says that ‘production, trafficking, and sale of illegal drugs by transnational and domestic criminal actors will continue to pose the most lethal threat to communities in the United States. Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids remain the most lethal of drugs trafficked into the country’. The DHS singles out China among state actors ‘using subversive tactics in an effort to influence and divide the American public and undermine confidence’. China is also singled out on the economic front, including for theft of US intellectual property, technology, and trade secrets. The DHS expects the United States’ supply chains to remain vulnerable to ‘foreign manipulation abroad’.
As for critical infrastructure, the DHS says that China, Russia, and Iran will remain the most pressing foreign threats. Domestic and foreign adversaries almost certainly will continue to threaten the integrity of critical infrastructure with disruptive and destructive cyber and physical attacks, in part, because they perceive targeting these sectors will have cascading impacts on US industries and the country’s standard of living, according to the assessment.
Visit DHS.gov.
Meanwhile the cyber firm Sophos has warned that by aplying generative AI, bad actors could tailor disinformation campaigns to affect election outcomes on a massive scale with relatively little effort.
