The past few weeks has seen aggressive action by the White House against Russia and China. Cyberwar has become a 3-way cage fight. Here’s a quick review of the fight and tactics to improve.
US Strategy Not Working: Hit Me, I Can Take It
Data exfiltration by Kaspersky and Huawei have been known for years among US cybersecurity researchers. However US government took the position that they are in control and not to worry. Regrettably the US is taking action against Russia and China AFTER the terabytes of data have been stolen. Lesson: Don’t get hit.
Deploy Countermeasures To Block Attacks
Current US national security strategy is based on a peacetime compliance model not cyberwar. Multi-factor authentication to stop credential theft, application layer access to stop self-propagating malware, encrypted offline data back to stop ransomware and partitioned compute to stop lateral attacks must become national standards.
Be Careful If The Other 2 Team Against You
In a 3-way fight the worse thing that can happen is that the other two fighters gang up on you. Luckily for now that isn’t happening. Russia lost trust in China after they reverse engineered their Su-27 fighter (on top of years of other efforts like that). China in turn doesn’t care for the anti-Asian rhetoric coming out of Moscow. So for now it’s fight among 3 but we need to prepare just in case they gang up on us.
Having A Great Team Makes A Difference
While this is a 3-way fight having a great support team makes a big difference (especially if the other 2 decide to work together). The Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence consortium (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and USA) should act as a block when any of the partners are attacked. Their surveillance systems are fully integrated facilitating joint action. “Use your mobile phone to steal data from one country and we’ll ban you from all 5.”
No One Said We Can’t Add To Team America
The wild card in the global cyberwar is India. With its vast pool of software developers and access to every compute system in the planet India is a cyber superpower. Traditionally India has been non-aligned but recent tussles with China have them looking to build a military partnership with Russia. The US government should get India onto Team America before its too late.
America will win in the end. The big issue is how many broken bones we’ll have.
Junaid Islam
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