Cyber attack

Last month, more than 50 countries and over 200 major corporations and organizations came together to agree that the international nature of cyber threats needs a cooperative global response and a common set of principles as a basis for security. This conclusion seems obvious—millions of people have been affected by malicious activity perpetrated through the internet—and yet consensus has proved difficult to obtain until now.

In February 2018, the German government’s network was attacked. Germany did not specify what kind of information was accessed by the foreign hackers, but it is publicly known that the hackers successfully attacked the IT system of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In light of Michael Sulmeyer’s excellent recent piece on splitting NSA and CYBERCOM, which ran at War on the Rocks last week, I want to pull together some of the key legal and policy developments of the past year in a single narrative. My aim is to put them in context with each other in a way that will provide useful background for those new to this issue, while also putting a spotlight on the deconfliction-of-equities issue that the split proposal raises.

In my first post on this subject, I quoted a news story in fedscoop saying that

The development of “loud” offensive cyber tools, [that could be definitively traced to the United States and thus] able to possibly deter future intrusions, represent a “different paradigm shift” from what the agency has used to in the past.