Next Administration Wants to Go Offensive on China
This idea is a little light on details. Congressman Mike Waltz (R-FL), the administration’s pick for national security advisor said that our prioritizing cyber defense is not working.
We have, over the years, improved defenses, but it is not enough. He said that we need to go on offense and impose higher costs and consequences on private actors and nation state actors.
In concept, that is probably an interesting idea. In practice, it is much harder. Especially when even our government admits that China is buried deep inside our critical infrastructure. They probably don’t care much if the lights go out for Chinese citizens, but US politicians will absolutely get blamed if our lights go out. Or water. Other other critical infrastructure.
When asked about Salt Typhoon, the attack on US telecom providers, Waltz would not answer the question.
When asked about what form a response might take, he would not answer.
He did say that the tech industry could be doing better, both helping us defend and “making our adversaries vulnerable”.
If this gets into a tit for tat model, US businesses will likely lose. Given that China alone – not counting its friends – has a cyber army of more than a quarter million that go to work every day trying to compromise us, could US businesses stand up to that if they are focused on destroying US companies instead of deploying malware to consumers? We already have a form of ransomware that is being deployed whose goal is only to do as much damage as possible. Think about that at scale.
While the US and China signed a pact in 2015 not to attack each other, that really is not working.
Critics of the move suggest that US tech companies would face consequences from US adversaries if they participated in offensive cyber, so it is not clear they would want to be part. For example, lets say that Amazon decides to help. And China finds out. And they figure out a way to take Amazon down for just one day. That would cost Amazon a billion dollars. Does Amazon really want to risk that much?
The Justice Department can issue as many arrest warrants as they want – it is not like China is going to turn hackers over to us.
It is certainly possible this could start a cyber arms race, which is not good either.
We shall see what happens. I hope the administration comes up with a great idea, but I am waiting to see it first.
Credit: The Register
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