DefenseOne's 'Why Haven't Terrorists Hit the US with a Devastating Cyber Attack?'
Sounds like a triple-reverse-Stockholm-syndrome-interrogatory, plus a rare reference by Michael Hayden: Note his '“These folks are not cyberdumb.” comment. All via Kathy Gilsinan, an Associate Editor at The Atlantic asking 'Why Haven't Terrorists Hit the US with a Devastating Cyber Attack?' Must have been a slow-cyber-news-day...
'“I’m as puzzled as you are,” said Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director from 2004 to 2008. “These folks are not cyberdumb.” “They use the web and show a great deal of sophistication in how they use it, for many purposes,” he added. “But they have not yet used it to create either digital or physical destruction. Others have.” - via Kathy Gilsinan, an Associate Editor at The Atlantic and writing at DefenseOne.
Well Done, Pete, Well Done
Behold: A well crafted white paper, targeting security related white papers, that is apparently a blog post, and most importantly, dripping with the sweet, sweet wine of security sarcasm. Today's Must Read!
US National Counterintelligence and Security Center Releases 2018 Foreign Economic Espionage in Cyberspace Report
National Counterintelligence and Security Center has released the Center's 2018 espionage report detailing foreign spying within the confines of 'cyberspace'. Both present and a modicum of future possibilities are covered. Enjoy!
The Next Battleground
via Rob Knake, writing at the Council on Foreign Relations' online outlet: Foreign Affairs and in the Snapshot section, comes this astute examination of the co-called cyberwarfare space's soft underbelly - power generation. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt aside: Successful attacks on electrical power generation and equally crucial power distribution capabilites would relegate vast swaths of the population into feudal vassals of regional political power (not too mention the demoralization of those populations). Today's Must Read.
"The digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned starkly last week. Most commentators took his declaration that “the warning lights are blinking red” as a reference to state-sponsored Russian hackers interfering in the upcoming midterm elections, as they did in the 2016 presidential election. But to focus on election interference may be to fight the last war, fixating on past attacks while missing the most acute vulnerabilities now. There’s reason to think that the real cyberthreat from Russia today is an attack on critical infrastructure in the United States—including one on the power grid that would turn off the lights for millions of Americans." - via Rob Knake, writing at Foreign Affairs
The Best Strategy for Cyber-Conflict May Not Be a Cyber-Strategy →
Terrific post at War On The Rocks, with an intriguing theory: The Best Strategy for Cyber-Conflict May Not Be A Cyber-Strategy, via Benjamin Runkle, . There's that pesky 'Cyber' thing again... At any rate, the discussion in this case, revolves around the leveraging of electronic, computational information warfare (perhaps also known as cyberwar) by the previous administration (President Obama). Elected (of course) - as today's Must Read, and watch out for 'them cybers'!
'We will respond in a time and place and manner of our choosing, and when we do so, we will consider a full range of tools, economic, diplomatic, criminal law enforcement, military, and some of those responses may be public, some of them may not be. One analyst derided the vice president’s pronouncements on the topic as “Biden threatening to threaten Russia.”' - via Benjamin Runkle at War On The Rocks