How America’s biggest corporations became cyber vigilantes: Foreign Policy

On September 10th, 2012, Tim Maurer wrote for Foreign Policy on how corporations are “increasingly going on the offensive, turning from firewalls to retaliation.”

Just as a quick aside, Maurer referenced a Washington Post article, written by Ellen Nakashima, on how the U.S. military is contemplating offensive cyber operations to defend private computer systems.  I had totally missed this article and, needless to say, it’s quite significant.

Back to the Foreign Policy article.  Maurer noted a recent survey of cybersecurity experts where “more than half [of the respondents] thought their companies would be well served by the ability to ‘strike back’ against their attackers.”  The same survey found that 29% of respondents wanted the ability to “proactively strike” and 25% thought their data would be safer if afforded the ability to strike back.  Moreover, a Black Hat conference poll found that 36% of participants “had already engaged in retaliatory hacking,” and that percentage is likely understated!

Something else that I was previously unaware of, courtesy of Maurer: Google hacked back against the perpetrators of Operation Aurora.

The article goes on to debate the merits and drawbacks of hackback, noting that “eye for an eye” can be very dangerous.  Maurer then suggested my favored solution: what if the government sanctioned active defense, thereby removing the specter of legal ramifications for what companies may already be doing and certainly believe they should be able to do?  The primary impediment to hackback would probably be the CFAA, or Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.  What if, consistent with the CFAA, the U.S. government sanctioned hackback by private companies?

The article made one last great point: apparently companies have been increasingly coming to the U.S. government looking for cyber protection, but considering “little has changed since the 2009 [Operation Aurora] hack,” they have had little success.  Why, then, should we be surprised if a company “decides not to call Washington and takes matters into its own hands instead[?]”

As you can probably guess, I’m pretty geeked about the idea of hackback/active defense.  Please check out Tim Maurer’s article for Foreign Policy here.