A pause in offensive operations — even briefly — could take months to recover from, Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and faculty member at IANS Research, told Axios.

Planning a cyber offense requires months of lurking and learning about a target’s networks to understand their weak points.

Russian cyber operatives could decide to completely re-wire their networks while Cyber Command has its pause in effect — and cyber adversaries from other countries could obfuscate their own activities by disguising them through known Russian tactics.

The downtime in activity could out any United States hackers who Russia was already suspicious of and monitoring closely, Williams added.