In the lead-up to the midterm elections, cybersecurity dominated conversations on safeguarding elections with a steady stream of support for bolstered protections against hacking. But cybersecurity matters for more than elections and recent breaches of CIA and military technology show that although a cyberattack isn’t a bullet to the head, it could easily lead to one.

The CIA learned this the hard way. In 2011, things started to go wrong. Really wrong. Intelligence assets in China ended up dead, and the U.S. didn’t know what do about it. But the problem had begun much earlier when Iran hacked into U.S. intelligence networks, reportedly using Google, and undermined the communications system.

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