December 22, 2021 — Every state wants to learn lessons from the multitude of cyber incidents that strike it and others, so that it can protect itself in the future. But when international cyber incidents are viewed together with geopolitical contestation, the lessons learned by small states are very different from those recognized by the global superpowers. Large states in NATO or the EU need to understand these other lessons to achieve their initiatives in the UN and elsewhere internationally. This chapter conveys five key lessons from the perspective of one small, highly connected state, and its small state neighbors in Southeast Asia. These lessons need to be recognized by the larger, globally dominant nations which seek the support of, or to support, the smaller nations in global cyber conflicts. MORE
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December 22, 2021 — Over the last decade, cyber threats have grown in magnitude and diversity, and governments devote massive efforts towards adjusting their cyber stance to the evolving threats of the next decade, developing multiple national cyber strategies and dedicated governmental entities to address cyber threats. The responses build on their own and sometimes other countries' experience. For many small nations, however, modest budgets and resources disadvantage their responses. In contrast, Israel succeeded in becoming a cyber success by deliberately leveraging the advantages of being small – Making quick decisions, having the dexterity to change course rapidly, and centralizing national efforts with relative ease. Israel has focused on organizational processes and thoughtful cyber strategy, offering some lessons that could be useful for other nations that are much larger in scale. MORE
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December 22, 2021 — Persistent engagement and defend forward are new cyberspace concepts and approaches that are gaining traction across the cyber enterprise. They challenge the assumptions and prescriptions of deterrence theory and thus require perseverance in ensuring the right lessons are learned. Claims by some that SolarWinds represents a failure of these approaches misses the mark in many respects, most of all by applying deterrence metrics inappropriately. Rather, recent experience has demonstrated that competition in cyberspace is going to be continuous. Competing requires persistence rather than episodic responses, and anticipation rather than reaction. MORE
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December 22, 2021 — In September 2009, the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security, the National Strategy Forum, and the McCormick Foundation held a workshop assembling approximately 35 experts on national security threats in cyberspace. The 46-page report, National Security Threats in Cyberspace, explored the then cyber threat vectors, legal frameworks, organizational questions and what the future would bring, among other topics. Our reporter was Paul Rosenzweig; as always, he captured the essence of the discussion – and we ended the report with a chapter on the "Metrics for Success." In short, all that was old is new again – this report is almost 13 years old, but all the metrics remain relevant and the same, and sadly, to a great extent, the metrics reflect policies not met. MORE
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December 22, 2021 — The United States (US) has a long history of proportional and in-kind response to adversary aggressions. If a US aircraft is shot down, the US will bomb anti-aircraft emplacements and runways or attain air superiority by clearing the skies of other fighter aircraft. If hostile actions are committed in cyberspace, the US will respond with limited cyberspace actions in an attempt to restrain escalation to a kinetic conflict. The US has failed to learn the lesson that conflict in the cyber age is inherently asymmetric and that cyber attack responses need not be quid-pro-quo. There is a range of diplomatic, economic, and information options for effective responses that follows the international legal principle of proportionality and do not necessarily result in escalation to the kinetic actions of warfare. The US should use, and be willing to target in others, all the DIME instruments of national power – i.e., diplomacy, information, military, and economic - to respond to and prevent future aggressions in cyberspace. MORE
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December 22, 2021 — Global supply chains received a one-two punch in 2020. The ongoing US-China trade war and COVID-19 made it clear that the increasingly complex, fragile, and opaque global supply chains were no longer sustainable. These significant shocks, coupled with the SolarWinds supply chain compromise and growing concerns over data security and digital supply chain risk, have caused many in the private sector to rethink their global footprint. These global transformations also create a rare opportunity to rethink the role of the private sector in national security. MORE
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December 22, 2021 — What infects the cyberspace societal substrate also infects its technological offspring. Whatever relies on the current shoddy, insecure cyberspace substrate inherits its vulnerabilities. This great silent unlearned lesson among technologists, promoters, government officials, and ignorant or optimistic users seems self-evident and yet is repeatedly unlearned. It would seem self-evident that, unless the underlying substrate is transformed to be securable, any new technology built on those insecure cyber foundations will, in turn, fall prey to the same assaults. That adversary and criminal campaigns to poison data, corrupt algorithms, and 'p0wn' development processes are fairly predictable is logically obvious for AI systems as well as quantum, robotics, autonomous systems, synthetic biology, and any other emerging technologies. They all rely on the highly corruptible, existing cyberspace substrate and inherit its attack surfaces in addition to new ones of their own. MORE
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December 22, 2021 — Unlearned lessons are those insights missed from a past situation. When we do not learn from experiences, we continue to make the same decisions in similar situations. In the case of the United States, unlearned lessons undermine the future security and prosperity of democracies. The results of unlearned lessons can be the individual’s free choice, but others, including some facing us now, heavily burden the future with the collective history of other prior choices. More volatile times face open societies globally. As Nassim Taleb observes, when the tails of a probability distribution get fatter, the predictable becomes a function of the distribution's extreme values and only those extreme values. In multiple publications, Taleb argues that the world is "undergoing a switch between continuous low-grade volatility to a process moving by jumps, with less and less variations outside of jumps." The faster the rate of systems change, the heavier become those tails, due mostly to the growth of unrecognized interdependence between the moving parts. In the statistical analysis of systems, if one is uncertain about the tails of the data, then one is uncertain about the mean as well. Yet, the faster the rate of systems change, the heavier become those tails, due mostly to the growth of unrecognized interdependence between the moving parts, and thus the less useful for learning are their means. Such a situation requires the prudent person to plan for maximal damage scenarios, not for most probable scenarios, and to ensure that the choices they make along the way offer reasonable and secure alternatives when the worst scenarios emerge. MORE
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December 22, 2021 — The US military knows well that it is fully engaged in ongoing 'peacetime' cybered conflict against state and nonstate actors intending to harm the US and its allies and partners.[1] This enduring conflict is driven by various motives and takes myriad forms, ranging from ransomware attacks and theft of technical intellectual property to what is, in effect, cyber privateering and piracy. Various issues afflict the cyberspace substrate and extend deep into the socio-technical-economic system (STES) of modern Western democracies. Given the grievous damage that could be done, these vulnerabilities—many self-inflicted—are astounding. Yet, to some extent, the US military (and perhaps its allies as well) perceives its forces and systems to be partially immune (at least internally) from these 'civilian' vulnerabilities since it has 'secure' communications, networks kept apart from the public internet, and air gaps between weapons systems and outside digital threats. But is this accurate? MORE
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December 22, 2021 — Informational content is just beginning to be properly considered as an urgent infrastructure security concern in addition to the physical integrity and functionality of the computers and telecommunications networks that enable the transmission of such content. The 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in the United States (US) raised awareness about disinformation campaigns and greatly increased both public and private sector efforts to combat foreign influence operations. But the importance of informational content goes far beyond its potential cognitive impact on human actors, such as voters. Automated industrial control systems (ICS) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be adversely impacted, or even maliciously manipulated, as well. In a world of heightened reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) and/or machine learning (ML) algorithms – which require large volumes of training data – content becomes part of the infrastructure, because each datum that is processed contributes to the future functionality of the algorithm. AI/ML algorithms that are trained on or receive disinformation inputs will yield imperfect outputs. MORE
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