Cybersecurity

Cipher Brief Expert Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former Chief of Station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA.  Hoff man is an advisor to Vaillance Group. Shawnee Delaney was a clandestine officer and former Detachment Chief ...

Rob Knake is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a non-resident fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center. Bryson Bort is CEO, of SCYTHE an attack emulation platform and co-founder of the ICS Village. OPINION -- A water system in Florida has been accessed by an unknown intruder ...

Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics from nuclear weapons to politics. In 2002, he and a team of Post reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. OPINION -- The worldwide cyber war ...

Patrick D. Gaul is the Executive Director of the National Technology Security Coalition (NTSC), a non-profit, non-partisan, industry-agnostic organization focused on uniting both public and private sector stakeholders around policies that improve national cybersecurity standards and awareness. OPINION -- This year, the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee Act (H.R. 1975) was included ...

Philip Reitinger is the President and CEO of the Global Cyber Alliance. You can follow him on Twitter @CarpeDiemCyber OPINION -- “Black Tuesday” for cybersecurity came on November 17, when the President of the United States fired Chris Krebs, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Mr. Krebs had the temerity to do ...

An attempted cyberattack on Israel’s water system in late April, just months after the global pandemic hit, prompted fears that cyber adversaries are getting even more bold in their efforts to cause harm. Israel’s national cyber chief, Yigal Unna, officially acknowledged the plot, calling it a ‘synchronized and organized attack’ ...

OPINION -- The US is taking a more active role in the ongoing cyber war between Russia and Ukraine on the side of the Kiev government. On May 14, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) announced the award of a four-year, $38 million contract to provide cyber security for critical ...

Tom Bossert spends a lot of time thinking about hacking.  The former Homeland Security Advisor to President Trump who also served as the country’s Chief Risk Officer and Senior Advisor on cyber, left his White House position in 2018. It happened just after Bossert spoke at The Cipher Brief’s Annual ...

Ben Buchanan recently testified at a House Homeland Security Subcommittee Meeting on Preparing for the Future:  An Assessment of Emerging Cyber Threats.  He is a Senior Faculty Fellow, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Mortara Center, Assistant Teaching Professor, Georgetown University.  Cybersecurity, already rife with challenges, is becoming even more complex with the rise ...

Cybersecurity firm Finite State issued a recent report concluding that telecommunications equipment made by Chinese firm Huawei present a higher percentage of security vulnerabilities than equipment produced by other firms. A story in The Wall Street Journal citied numerous sources inside the Administration who pointed to the report as further ...

Japan’s cybersecurity will be put to the test over the next 18 months. The world’s attention will be fixed on the island country as it hosts two major events: the Rugby World Cup in September and the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. The tournaments will likely be an attractive target for ...

Cipher Brief Expert Thomas Donahue retired from CIA after 32 years of service. He served as the Chief Editor of the President’s Daily Brief and other CIA daily production during the second term of the Clinton administration, and spent the last 18 years of his career focused on cyber threats ...

(Ed note: Follow co-author Dr. Catherine Lotrionte's sessions at RSA this week: Nation States Behaving Badly: The Evolving Rules of the Game in Cyberspace March 6, 8:00am and Engaging Internationally in Support of Cybersecurity for Critical Functions, March 6, 9:20am.) One of the fundamental issues for geopolitical leaders is to ...

Bottom Line Up Front Russia continues to attack the data and computer networks of Western countries and organizations. Moscow will target any organization that seeks to report the truth on the Kremlin’s criminal activities, from the downing of flight MH-17 to more banal Russian actions like sports doping. On October ...

Mr. President, as you know the United States has faced cyber attacks of increasing frequency and viciousness from our adversaries. Your NSC is about to bring you both a new cyber strategy and a proposal to modify a previous NSC document called PPD-20 to give US Cyber Command more authority ...

Rest in peace, Cyber Coordinator. The White House’s Special Assistant to the President and Cyber Coordinator has now been eliminated, apparently ending (or more likely pausing) a two-decade history. It will widely be reckoned as a hideous mistake but not perhaps the one which most needs our immediate attention. The ...

When accountability is used as innovation, it not only drives social change but also helps solve seemingly intractable problems. Cybersecurity is an industry that can desperately use a dose of accountability-as-innovation – and there are plenty of examples in U.S. industry it could follow. Take CVS, for instance. In the ...

It is not news that cyberspace is insecure. Attackers have had the advantage over defenders for not just years, but decades. Quotes from decades ago make it clear that cyber defenders then faced the same challenges we do today (and with a similar lack of success). When was the last ...

Cyber events of the past two years—perpetrated by state actors in several notable cases, according to public statements by the U.S. and British governments— have demonstrated the potential for damaging impact to national security, critical infrastructures, and the global economy. Electric power distribution, healthcare services, pharmaceutical manufacturing and global shipping ...

Everyone loves public-private sector partnerships (PPPs). For over 20 years, these initiatives have been critical to a range of cybersecurity solutions. Perhaps 85 percent of the critical infrastructure (the number varies depending on who is doing the guessing) is owned by the private sector, so government cannot do it on ...

The White House deployed words to chide Russia for the NotPetya attack. On 15 February 2018, the White House Press Secretary released a blunt statement: In June 2017, the Russian military launched the most destructive and costly cyber-attack in history. The attack, dubbed “NotPetya,” quickly spread worldwide, causing billions of ...

Every organization should have a plan to protect its critical information from the actions of a disgruntled employee, or from a criminal hacker looking to make money, or from a nation state actor – an advanced persistent threat or “APT” – looking to advance its national agenda. Management teams and ...

Cipher Brief Cyber Advisory Board members offer their views on threats to the U.S. power grid, as interviewed by Cipher Brief Publisher and CEO Suzanne Kelly. Former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Work, a member of The Cipher Brief’s Cyber Advisory Board, says potential attacks on the U..S power grid ...

The world is just beginning to experience the disruptions being generated by blockchain, the technology that underpins Bitcoin and that provides a new way to fight fraud and improve cybersecurity. The waves of innovation already underway make clear that it will change our overall business environment in the same way ...

Bottom Line: Since 2016, the North Korean regime has shown its hand as a state sponsor of cybercrime by targeting international financial institutions, engaging in broad ransomware campaigns, and illegally accruing and laundering cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. This pattern of behavior supports Pyongyang’s objective of self-financing the ruling Korean Worker’s ...

We may be frustrated by the state of cybersecurity today, with the attackers getting better and more audacious year after year, but defenders would be even worse off without the dozens of technological, operational and policy innovations generated in the past 50 years. And even as measures once considered new ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two major software vulnerabilities in the Intel microprocessors inside the vast majority of all computers. Dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre,” the vulnerabilities could allow hackers to siphon off the entire memory contents of computers, mobile phones and servers that run on cloud networks. Two Cipher Brief experts ...

Not a day goes by that Americans don't wake to the news of a new cyber intrusion affecting private sector or government networks, whether major cyber hacks at Target or Equifax, sloppy data breaches like those Verizon experienced, or nation-state-sponsored efforts like the WannaCry virus. Companies and institutions are pouring ...

Bottom Line: U.S. cyber defenders know how to take down botnets – networks of computers that have been hacked to act as one – but not how to keep them from coming back, nor necessarily how to determine who is behind them and hold them accountable. These networks under the ...

For this last week of 2017, we asked our experts to look ahead at key national security issues. NSA veteran Rick Ledgett offers some cybersecurity lessons learned, and a warning of what's to come. On Iranian and North Korean cyber activity: Those two actors are very different in their motivations and ...

The launch of Bitcoin futures trading is a good moment to consider the cyber and wider security issues raised by this and other cryptography-based currencies. It is worth making the distinction between the blockchain technology underpinning Bitcoin, and Bitcoin as a currency or investment. The second has generated heat and headlines, but it is ...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 on Thursday to dismantle their authorities to enforce net neutrality rules that prohibit internet service providers, such as Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast, from interfering in the traffic streams that take place over their infrastructure. The reversal of the FCC’s 2015 decision means the ...

Terrorist groups are expanding their use of the internet beyond mere messaging and disseminating operational know-how, slowly adding a cyber-hacking toolset that could one day rival that of criminal or state-sponsored hacking. To date attacks have included website defacement, doxing of personally identifiable information, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) ...

Despite all the attention, cyberspace is far from secure. Why this is so reflects flawed technologies and conceptual weaknesses. The result is institutionalized stalemate. Two questions highlight shortcomings in the discussion of cybersecurity. The first is why, after more than two decades, we have not seen anything like a cyber ...

The Trump Administration’s National Security Council has released an unclassified set of guidelines for determining when the U.S. government will disclose – rather than retain for espionage purposes – a computer vulnerability that it discovers to the relevant private sector vendor so that a patch can be distributed. Led by ...

The Cipher Brief Cyber Advisory Board’s Bob Gourley commented on the Trump administration’s new process for disclosing software vulnerabilities it has detected – the first time a U.S. administration has revealed its internal rules, aka the Vulnerability Equities Process. This is a significant improvement and clarification of the existing process ...

The intelligence community has been taking body blows lately – with Friday’s WikiLeaks dump of CIA hacking tools and a report in The New York Times discusses just how damaging the August 2016 Shadow Brokers thefts from NSA have turned out to be.  While there has been no acknowledgment by ...

Software is the invisible underpinning for much of our digital world. At its core is source code: the lingua franca that allows software-based technology systems to operate and evolve. Typically, source code is the very embodiment of a particular innovation. It is intellectual property that defines the software-based innovation, its ...

The numbers are staggering, yet only the tip of the iceberg. More than 145 million American citizens are affected by the Equifax data breach disclosed last month; that’s more than half of the American adult population. At the same time, this is only the latest in a series of cyber ...

Earlier this month, two members of the House of Representatives Tom Graves (R-GA) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) introduced a bill called Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act, dubbed the “hack back” bill, which would allow companies to hack the hackers who infiltrate their computer networks to retrieve or delete stolen data ...

During multiple war zone tours of duty in the Middle East and South Asia, I learned firsthand how timely and effective incident response entails real time insight, color, and context for the analyst. Incident response should enable the analyst more efficiently to mitigate the damage from an attack, as well ...

Russian state-sponsored hackers reportedly stole details in 2015 on how the U.S. spies on foreign intelligence targets through cyber espionage, as well as how it defends against cyber operations directed at its classified networks. According to the Wall Street Journal, the material was taken from a NSA contractor’s private computer ...

In May 2015, Russia and China signed a “nonaggression pact” in cyberspace. They agreed not to target each other with cyber attacks and promote the idea of sovereignty in cyberspace. China and Russia are now seeking to eliminate virtual private network services (VPN’s) from their respective internet space. Russian President ...

It is a problem for the U.S. that many of the core concepts that guide internet policy date to the 1990s. One such concept is that the internet is a virtual alternative to the Westphalian state, without borders and where sovereignty does not apply. The problem with this concept is ...

In the nearly seven years since the U.S. Department of Defense declared cyberspace a “domain” of warfare – alongside land, air, sea, and space – the Pentagon has developed an overarching Cyber Strategy to guide their efforts in the new domain and raised a Cyber Command that has grown from ...

On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a binding directive compelling all federal civilian departments and agencies to identify and develop a plan to end any use of and remove any Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab products from their computer systems. “The Department is concerned about the ties between certain ...

Recent fatal accidents involving two vessels in the U.S. Seventh Fleet led to a spate of speculation about whether somehow the navigation in these ships was compromised by a cyber intrusion. Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing has been highlighted as a possible contributing factor. While investigations are still underway to ...

There has been a recent wave of high-sea collisions in the Asia-Pacific involving U.S. naval vessels – most notably the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain, which together have resulted in the loss of more U.S. military personnel then in Afghanistan so far this year. The incidents, both involving ...

With round one of renegotiations behind us, and round two scheduled to begin on September 1 in Mexico City, despite efforts to move quickly, there is still a pretty long road ahead for the next version of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). When NAFTA was first negotiated in ...

The reality of modern times is that nations are in a constant state of cyber engagement – either for espionage, influence, or disruption purposes. While there is a tacit acknowledgement that cyber espionage for political and military purposes is is fair game, some actions such as the disruption of critical ...