Tuesday 12 January 2021

How can the cybersecurity community defend against this type of attack?

 This is a scenario, because the intrusions were so well done, when it’s hard to come up with a list of easy fixes. Because these are sophisticated adversaries, they compromised a system, SolarWinds, that was incredibly widely used and widely trusted. They essentially exploited that trust to carry out their operations, and that is something that’s really hard to defend against. This is not the same thing as just fixing a single software vulnerability and applying a patch—it’s a lot more difficult to combat this kind of threat.

This sheds some light on just how fierce the competition is between nations in cyberspace. We spend a lot of time talking about things like deterrence, norms and signaling between nations. But my view is that this kind of activity—competition, espionage, well below the threshold of conflict, what I call shaping the international environment to suit one’s ends—that’s par for the course in computer science average salary. So, while this is certainly a high-water mark, the daily competition that leads to events like this is par for the course. And I think we probably need to spend more time in the policy world thinking about the implications of that. It’s pretty clear right now [that] the status quo, both in policy and in technology, does not let us deter this activity, and does not let us technically block this activity.


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