BFF-21,22 Amid Russia hacks, US offers cyber expertise to allies

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Amid Russia hacks, US offers cyber expertise to allies

WASHINGTON, Oct 5, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – After years of ceaseless attacks from
state-sponsored hackers, the US is taking toughening its stance in the cyber
fight against Russia, China and other nations.

Critics have long charged that America’s response has fallen woefully short
as adversaries targeted US national security networks, government agencies
and voting systems.

But under a series of new measures, US officials are touting a more
muscular approach — including a greater willingness to launch offensive
cyber operations.

President Donald Trump recently revoked his predecessor Barack Obama’s
rules requiring high-level authority for big military cyber operations, and
National Security Advisor John Bolton warned that any country conducting
cyber attacks could face an offensive response.

Then on Thursday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the US is making its
cyber capabilities available to NATO, warning Moscow it must “pay the piper”
after the Netherlands revealed an alleged plot by Russia’s GRU military
intelligence agency to hack the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons.

Coincidentally, the US on Thursday indicted seven GRU agents as part of a
joint crackdown with Western allies on a series of major hacking plots
attributed to Moscow.

Mattis said an international response to hacking attacks would not
necessarily be a tit-for-tat cyber offensive, but told Moscow it would “have
to be held to account.”

RAND Corporation intel and cyber expert Cortney Weinbaum told AFP that in
today’s modern threat environment, kinetic weapons alone are no longer
sufficient.

She said she interpreted Mattis’s comments “as meaning that the US will
offer all of our warfare capabilities, which now include cyber, to defend the
NATO alliance members.”

“This pledge will hopefully have a deterrent effect to prevent such a
scenario from occurring,” she added.

Other experts also approved of the move.

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“NATO needs to ensure it has the requisite tools, capabilities and
strategies in place to match the current threat environment,” Frank Cilluffo,
who directs the McCrary Insitute for Cyber & Critical Infrastructure at
Auburn University, told AFP.

Still, the Pentagon is playing catch up as it bolsters its capabilities,
having for years under invested in talent that all too often is swiped up by
the well-paying private sector.

“A great deal of the department’s cyber readiness issues revolve around the
shortage of skilled cyber-capable personnel,” Senator Mike Rounds, who heads
a Senate cybersecurity subcommittee, said last week.

“The current recruitment, pay, retention, and career pathway structures in
place are not equipped to manage this problem.”

– ‘Defend forward’ –

Last month, the Pentagon released a revamped cyber strategy that states it
will conduct cyberspace operations to collect intelligence and prepare
military cyber capabilities to be used in the event of crisis or conflict.

The report blasted Russia and China for what it called their continued
interference.

“We will defend forward to disrupt or halt malicious cyber activity at its
source, including activity that falls below the level of armed conflict,” the
strategy states.

According to a report in Bloomberg News on Thursday, tiny chips inserted in
US computer equipment manufactured in China were used as part of a vast
effort by Beijing to steal US technology secrets.

The chips, the size of a grain of rice, were reportedly used on equipment
made for Amazon, which first alerted US authorities, as well as Apple and
possibly for other companies and government agencies including the military.

The US has not said much about the types offensive cyber operations it has
pulled off in the past, though it has acknowledged attacking Islamic State
group networks.

But “if you look at what the Russians are doing, figure that we can
probably do that stuff too — whether we would is another question,” said
cyber expert Martin Libicki, a professor at the US Naval Academy.

“US operational security is pretty good. We may well be doing things that
others have not discovered,” he told AFP.

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