This post was created on 09/20/2018.
The U.S. military has initiated a more aggressive way of dealing with malicious cyber activity. The Pentagon calls it the “defend forward” strategy and will try to stop any malicious cyber activity at its source. This new strategy emphasizes the fact that the U.S. military wants to build a more lethal force of hackers to use against enemy forces. This essentially just gives the U.S. military more freedom to do what it wants, even against friendly countries.
Now this, of course, has caused some people to be extremely concerned as to what the U.S. military will be able to do with these more “loose” rules of cyber-security. Jason Healey, a senior research scholar at Columbia University and former George W. Bush White House cyber official, has stated that “If you loosen the rules of engagement, sometimes you’re going to mess that up.” Even if the U.S. military does try to use this new tactic as ethically as possible, there is inevitably going to be human error that will slip through and cause problems.
This new tactic could be used in a variety of ways, both good and bad. This new tactic could be used to try and stop any election meddling and try and stop the Russians from targeting the U.S. infrastructure. It could also be used in more malicious ways, let’s say the U.S. military believes there are hackers in France and decide to take down an entire network of computers in France. They could do this before but they would have had to get permission from the NSA, but under these new rules they don’t have to get permission from the NSA, now they can just do it.
This new strategy is going to be more aggressive towards those who use hacking or any use of malicious cyber attacks. This could potentially cause problems in the future if the U.S. military is abusive with it, but it could also prevent a lot of cyber sabotage over the free internet. There is inevitably going to be a mistake made with this “defense forward” strategy, but if it keeps hackers from meddling with our infrastructure, then maybe it’ll do some good.
Source: US military given more authority to launch preventative cyberattacks
Cyberleech 