First Strike: US Cyber Warriors Seize the Offensive
First Strike: US Cyber Warriors Seize the Offensive
When the Pentagon launched its much-anticipated “Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace” in July 2011, it appeared the US military was interested only in protecting its own computer networks, not in attacking anyone else’s. “The thrust of the strategy is defensive,” declared Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn. The Pentagon would not favor the use of cyberspace “for hostile purposes.” Cyber war was a distant thought. “Establishing robust cyber defenses,” Lynn said, “no more militarizes cyberspace than having a navy militarizes the ocean.”
That was then. Much of the cyber talk around the Pentagon these days is about offensive operations. It is no longer enough for cyber troops to be deployed along network perimeters, desperately trying to block the constant attempts by adversaries to penetrate front lines. The US military’s geek warriors are now prepared to go on the attack, armed with potent cyberweapons that can break into enemy computers with pinpoint precision.
The new emphasis is evident in a program launched in October 2012 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s experimental research arm. DARPA funding enabled the invention of the Internet, stealth aircraft, GPS, and voice-recognition software, and the new program, dubbed Plan X, is equally ambitious. DARPA managers said the Plan X goal was “to create revolutionary technologies for understanding, planning, and managing cyberwarfare.” The US Air Force was also signaling its readiness to go into cyber attack mode, announcing in August that it was looking for ideas on how “to destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive, corrupt, or usurp the adversaries [sic] ability to use the cyberspace domain for his advantage.”
The new interest in attacking enemies rather than simply defending against them has even spread to the business community. Like their military counterparts, cybersecurity experts in the private sector have become increasingly frustrated by their inability to stop intruders from penetrating critical computer networks to steal valuable data or even sabotage network operations. The new idea is to pursue the perpetrators back into their own networks. “We’re following a failed security strategy in cyber,” says Steven Chabinsky, formerly the head of the FBI’s cyber intelligence section and now chief risk officer at CrowdStrike, a startup company that promotes aggressive action against its clients’ cyber adversaries. “There’s no way that we are going to win the cybersecurity effort on defense. We have to go on offense.”