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Another year, another cyber Pearl Harbor. If our cyber managers had been in charge in 1942, the entire U.S. Navy Pacific fleet might’ve ended up on the bottom of the ocean. And then issued a report on “lessons learned” from the “wake up call.”

Not only have U.S. defense and homeland security organs failed to build break-proof defenses after previous cyber “Pearl Harbors”— Russia's subversion of the 2016 election, anyone?  China’s 2013 theft of federal personnel files? — they’ve too often just screamed shock then proceeded to spend billions more on traps that don’t spring. 

This week, we have another cyber Casablanca: Nobody on the inside was really shocked to discover that Russian cyber thieves had been rummaging around undetected for at least three months in the agencies principally responsible for U.S. defense, including the departments of State, Homeland Security, Treasury and the Pentagon, says Herbert Lin, a towering expert in cyber security at Stanford. 

"I don't think there was an…