WASHINGTON, D.C. — A panel of four leading cybersecurity experts testified Tuesday that this week was worse than last week, but declined to rule out that it would be remembered as one of the better weeks of the year once next week happens.

The hearing, convened to "establish a clear picture of the current threat landscape," lasted six hours and produced one whiteboard. Witnesses spent the morning agreeing that last week was bad, the early afternoon establishing that this week was worse, and the remaining three hours declining to say anything about next week beyond a question mark, which a committee aide underlined twice in red at the panel's request.

"I want to be very precise for the record," said Dr. Ellen Varga, a former federal incident response lead now at a policy institute. "Last week we had a zero-day in a VPN appliance, a ransomware attack on a hospital network and a password manager that leaked its own passwords. This week we had all three again, plus the VPN appliance's patch, which was also a zero-day."

Asked by the committee chair whether the trend was improving, Varga said it was "stable," in the sense that it had been getting worse at a consistent rate since roughly 1988.

Fellow witness Dr. Martin Hollis, who spent most of the testimony with a hand over his eyes, told the committee he had prepared written remarks on this week's incidents but that they were out of date by the time he reached the building. "I submitted them Monday," he said. "By Tuesday morning two of the vendors in my footnotes had been breached, and one of them was the vendor I'd recommended as the fix."

"People ask me if next week will be worse," said Hollis. "I tell them that every week for twenty years has been the worst week in cybersecurity history, and I have yet to be wrong. Next week is a strong contender."