For much of the transportation industry’s digitization evolution, cybersecurity (when it was considered at all) was treated as an IT problem: Important but largely optional and definitely secondary to operational efficiency. That era is over.
Even beyond the clear signals from the operational impact of the ever-more common cyberattacks the industry faces, the legal and regulatory environment entering 2026 makes it clear that cybersecurity and data governance are now core legal and business obligations with real consequences for non-compliance.
The most significant shift is the growing recognition that cyber incidents create systemic risk to the industry that extends beyond the single victim organization. Ransomware attacks, data breaches, and cyber-enabled cargo theft disrupt supply chains and expose sensitive personal and operational data, undermining trust across the transportation ecosystem. Regulators, insurers, and lawmakers are taking notice and beginning to respond accordingly.
At the federal level, the forthcoming Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) represents a watershed moment for many in the transportation industry. Once in effect, covered entities will be required to report qualified cyber incidents within strict timelines. For an industry that has historically lacked formal incident reporting requirements (with the exception of publicly-traded corporations) this introduces new legal exposure, operational demands and new expectations around detection and response preparedness and documentation requirements.
At the same time, state-level privacy laws are continuing to expand. California’s CPRA and similar statutes in other states now extend protections to employee and contractor data, including driver information generated by in-cab cameras, biometrics, and behavioral analytics. This can create unique and complex challenges for interstate carriers by creating a patchwork of overlapping and sometimes conflicting obligations regarding how data is collected, stored, shared, and retained. It is no longer sufficient to keep data protected from hackers, organizations must know where all sensitive data resides, why it exists, and who has access to it.
These legal pressures are being reinforced by the insurance industry as well. Cyber insurers increasingly require self-certification or advanced proof of relative cybersecurity maturity already in place in the organization before a binder will be issued. In practice, insurers are essentially acting as de facto regulators by penalizing organizations that cannot demonstrate basic cyber hygiene with higher premiums, exclusions, or outright denials of coverage.
Vendor and supply chain accountability is also intensifying. Federal agencies and regulators are pushing “secure by design” expectations out to the supply chain and increasing scrutiny into software providers, SaaS platforms, and many other systems that support transportation industry operations. Organizations must now not only control their own internal risk but also consider the risk they bring on through third-party vendors in their decision-making process as well. This can be a challenging requirement in an industry that builds on a wide range of interconnected systems and relies heavily on trust-based data sharing.
As a whole, all of these trends collectively signal a fundamental shift taking place in the industry. Cybersecurity failures are increasingly treated as governance failures, not technical issues. Boards, executives, and operations leaders can no longer delegate cybersecurity risk to the IT team. Legal compliance, privacy protections, operational resilience, and cybersecurity must all be considered as components of a single governance and accountability framework in the organization.
Review the 2026 Transportation Industry Cybersecurity Trends Report for additional details on the evolving legal and regulatory landscape in transportation, and tips on how to stay ahead as these changes ripple across the industry.
