Two industry surveys released this week paint a consistent picture of the defense industrial base: contractors say they’re more confident in their cybersecurity compliance than ever, even as their ability to prove that compliance lags behind.
Kiteworks surveyed 273 defense contractors in the days following the Pentagon’s July suspension of CMMC 2.0 Phase 2 third-party assessments. Ninety-six percent said they were confident their self-attested Supplier Performance Risk System (SPRS) score would hold up under review, but only 29% could back that claim with both a current SPRS submission and a FedRAMP-authorized platform.
Kiteworks combined its two readiness measures — one tracking compliance maturity, the other tracking how contractors responded to the suspension itself — by multiplying rather than averaging them, producing a combined score of 60 out of 100, well below the roughly 77 a simple average would have produced. Nearly a third of respondents scored low on both measures at once, the report’s largest single grouping.
The CMMC Phase 2 suspension hasn’t removed contractors’ legal exposure. The underlying DFARS obligation to attest accurately never paused, even though the third-party check on those attestations did, and 84% of contractors told Kiteworks they were concerned about False Claims Act liability tied to an inaccurate score. In fact, 92% said they had already brought in legal or compliance review.
