New documentary offers raw look at modern cyber battlefield

“It’s very hot out there. If we're not in cyber war already, we’re extremely close to it,” Grace Cassy, a former British diplomat and co-founder of CyLon Ventures, a firm investing in cybersecurity startups, tells Cybernews. She’s one of the experts appearing in the upcoming cybersecurity documentary “Midnight in the War Room.”

The new film, produced by US cybersecurity company Semperis, is only expected to premiere in early 2026. But the trailer has already been released, and it’s fascinating, giving cybersecurity the cinematic treatment it’s long deserved.

As journalists who report on cyber incidents, threat actors, state-sponsored hacking campaigns, and major data breaches every day, we know how high the stakes are.

“An awful lot of activity”

We’re also sadly aware that the general populace still lacks knowledge about what’s happening. That’s why the upcoming documentary seems like a much-needed wake-up call that also reveals the human side of cyber war: courage, burnout, and the relentless fight to keep the lights on.

The lights, by the way, can definitely be turned off – and have already. In Ukraine, attacked by Russia in 2022, and elsewhere, threat actors constantly target water and power systems, food supply chains, financial institutions, and, of course, healthcare networks.

Dr. Chase Cunningham, one of the featured in “Midnight in the War Room,” told Forbes recently that nearly a hundred Americans died last year when ransomware hit hospitals and care facilities.

“People are dying, and no one blinks an eye,” said Cunningham, a cyber warfare expert who, like his colleagues all over the world, is blinking – hard.

The documentary features more than 50 renowned experts on cyber war, including former CIA Director General David Petraeus, Chris Inglis, America’s first National Cyber Director, and Jen Easterly, former CISA Director.

“Defeating the malicious cyberattacks that threaten our way of life will take more than technology designed to be secure – it will take the creativity and curiosity of the human mind,” said Easterly, who left her post just as Donald Trump was inaugurated as the new US President in January 2025.

“Those qualities empower defenders to outthink and outmaneuver adversaries, and it’s an honor to be part of Midnight in the War Room to advance that mission.”

One of the experts appearing in the film is Grace Cassy, a former British diplomat and co-founder of CyLon Ventures, a firm investing in cybersecurity startups. She’s clearly worried about what’s going on.

“There’s an awful lot of activity by this mixed group of state actors, non-state criminal actors, individual opportunists, and so on. Cumulatively, all this is having more and more impact on our economies and our resilience as societies,” Cassy told Cybernews.

Even in Ukraine, under attack from Russia for almost four years, the war only seems classically kinetic. There are drones, there’s electronic warfare, and there’s battlefield misinformation.

More senior officials are speaking out

“Ukraine has vividly demonstrated that the battlefield is no longer just kinetic – it’s cognitive, autonomous, and contested in milliseconds,” Cassy, who worked for months on the United Kingdom’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review team as an external expert, wrote earlier this year.

“The war has shifted the locus of defence innovation from well-established prime contractors to agile startups, who can rapidly respond to the pace of battlefield developments. This is happening at a time when advances in AI, quantum, and biotech are progressing at dizzying speed.”

According to Cassy, the ordinary citizen right now, though, still thinks of cybercrime as identity theft and ransomware attacks. But actually, there’s so much more going on – for instance, “nation states actors like China are pre-positioning in the systems of potential adversaries to have a card to play in the future – should they want or have to.”

Indeed, in early 2024, the US agencies publicly attributed attacks by Volt Typhoon – a China-based state-sponsored operation – intrusions into computer networks at US ports, water utilities, airports, and other targets – to Beijing. China later admitted it was behind the attacks.

It’s important that more people understand the scale of what’s happening. Without being alarmist, this is something we need to take seriously. We need to think about how we would deter and, if necessary, recover from a cyberattack.

Grace Cassy.

“This is a very interesting time for those of us who observe trends in this space. With this film, we were trying to draw attention to all those threat actors exploiting all those threat vectors, but also to throw some light on the defenders who are out there every day in the trenches,” Cassy told Cybernews.

“Their work is not particularly well known or understood by the general public,” she admitted before pointing out that, actually, a sort of shift is beginning because more high-profile officials are coming out and speaking about cyber threats publicly.

For instance, retired four-star Gen. Tim Haugh, who was fired from his role as head of both the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command in April, recently gave an interview to CBS News and spoke pretty bluntly about China’s cyber shenanigans.

In the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said that cyber threats in the country continue to escalate, and that the UK is now experiencing four “nationally significant” cyberattacks every week.

“I’m really glad the NCSC came out with this. It’s important that more people understand the scale of what’s happening. Without being alarmist, this is something we need to take seriously. We need to think about how we would deter and, if necessary, recover from a cyberattack,” said Cassy.

Sure, a lot of money is spent across the cybersecurity industry every year to try to prevent attacks from happening. But the reality is that some attacks will always get through, she added.

“What the NSCS is trying to do is make sure that people have thought ahead to what they will do in the event that something gets through their own defences,” Cassy explained.

Unlock more exclusive Cybernews content on YouTube.