In May 2018, the White House eliminated the position of National Cybersecurity Coordinator. The move has been met with much pushback from some in the cybersecurity community and even politicians. Democratic lawmakers were seeking to propose legislation to restore the position. In a statement made by the National Security Council the move was to “streamline management in order to improve efficiency, reduce bureaucracy, and increase accountability.” Nevertheless, given the fact that many security officials including the Director of National Intelligence have identified cyber threats as a national security priority, the removal of this position is largely considered a step backward and not forward. However, this may be more of a kneejerk reaction than an honest assessment of the roles and responsibilities that have been undertaken by those individuals appointed to the position.
With roots starting as early as 1997, the position first emerged in 2009 and has had three individuals in the role of Cybersecurity Coordinator – Howard Schmidt (2009-2012), Michael Daniel (2012-2017), and Rob Joyce (2017-2018), who is looking to return to the National Security Agency (NSA). The Cybersecurity Coordinator has been primarily a policy position lacking any day-to-day authority over any of the groups working on cyber security. Critics have pointed out that while the Cyber Coordinator can make recommendations, the position has no direct authority as far as budgeting is concerned, nor can the position compel agencies to comply with guidelines. This has been a systematic problem with the position – it can make all of the recommendations it wants, but if it cannot compel agencies to implement them within a specified amount of time, the title becomes largely ceremonial. Government Accounting Office reports on government cybersecurity efforts consistently find shortcomings in the federal government’s approach to ensuring the security of federal information systems and cyber critical infrastructure.
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There is much concern about the realities of “Cyber Battle Fatigue” – a condition resulting from a never-ending process of defending networks and sensitive information from an onslaught of cyber attacks conducted by cyber criminals, cyber espionage actors, and hacktivists. These attackers continue to use a wide variety of tactics, tools, and procedures that span from being unsophisticated to very sophisticated and continue to have more successes than failures. Two things are certain in a constantly-changing domain – that no business that operates online is immune to being targeted, and two, the cyber security talent pool is sparse, and is contributing to the cyber battle fatigue reality.
The numbers are staggering and continue to outperform previous activity. In 2017, ransomware attacks demonstrated how prolific just one type of attack was. The WannaCry outbreak impacted computers in more than 150 countries that cost approximately USD $ 4 billion. According to one U.S. IT Company, in 2017, some notable cybercrime statistics illustrate the challenges facing those network defenders:
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Recently, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating whether Facebook, Inc. used personal data by an analytics firm associated with the Trump campaign. Specifically, the FTC is trying to determine if the company violated terms of an earlier consent decree when 50 million users’ data was transferred to Cambridge Analytica, a data and media consultancy firm. To date, Cambridge Analytica has been accused of misrepresenting the purpose of some of its data mining, which yielded something like 30 million Facebook profiles it could comb for data. This calls into question how consumer information is shared with other entities, particularly when consent was not provided.
Social Media & GDPR
This revelation has called into question how social media sights harvest the personal information from their platforms. As one article pointed out, “Some large-scale data harvesting and social manipulation is okay until the election. Some of it becomes not okay in retrospect.” This is indeed troubling in a time when personal information is constantly used by malicious actors for monetization purposes or used in support of the conduct of other operations (e.g., social engineering, spam, phishing, credential theft, etc.). A recent report by a content marketing agency revealed that Facebook logins can be sold for USD $5.20. Such access provides a criminal to a compromised individual’s contact list to target other individuals. According to the same report, an individual’s entire online identity – to include personal identifiable information and financial accounts – could be sold for USD $1,200.00. After initially denying the claim, Facebook acknowledged the breach and promised to take action.
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According to recent reporting, a suspected nation state hacker group with alleged ties to the Iranian government issued death threats to researchers that had detected their cyber espionage activity. The researchers were checking a server that they believed to be associated with a specific data breach when they received the message “Stop!!! I Kill You Researcher.” According to the same report, the server was apparently attached to the attackers’ command-and-control infrastructure. Active since 2015, the group known as “MuddyWaters” has been observed targeting organizations in Georgia, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkey, and the United States. Recently, MuddyWaters has been observed targeting oil and gas entities in the Middle East. Notably, the group is believed to employ “false flag” operations – similar to what was believed to have been done during the recent Olympics – in which it adopted some of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) of suspected Chinese hackers to obfuscate the group’s true identity.
On the surface, the threat made against the researchers can be viewed as knee-jerk reaction to being tracked by the private sector. But this does raise the possibility of what hostile actors may resort to in the future. The private sector computer security has been aggressively investigating the activities of suspected nation states actors since 2004 when the first report published the activities of a Chinese state entity. Since that time, several subsequent reports have been provided to the public detailing “advanced persistent threat” operations detailing TTPs and targeting that have ultimately been attributed to specific nation state actors. While the standard public reaction of these governments has been to refute or deny the claims, citing the difficulties in providing adequate evidence that supports attribution, sanctions and alleged retaliatory strikes have been know to occur as a result of these accusations.
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On May 11, the U.S. President’s Executive Order (EO) “Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure” was finally signed. This long awaited EO comes on the heels of leaked earlier versions throughout the first part of 2017. Each subsequent leaked iteration – a draft was published by the Washington Post in January, a revision was published by the Lawfare Blog in February, and the most comprehensive iteration was leaked in early May and also published by the Lawfare Blog.
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in December 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a new information security doctrine, which updates the older 2000 version. The doctrine, a system of official views on the insurance of the national security of the country in the information sphere, regards the main threats to Russia’s security and national interest from foreign information making its way into the country, and sets priorities for countering them.
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